Hi, Alicia.
I have not used Adobe Connect, but I would be very surprised if we could hand-off our authentication to them. Open to the public sounds good, then.
How are things looking on your end? Our original plan had been to switch the sites over tomorrow, but I noticed that you've added a number of additional items to the spreadsheet in the past few days. We will need at least 3-5 business days past when you are done adding items in order to address outstanding issues and have a launch candidate ready. Do you know when you'll have all your feedback in? Please let me know so we can plan accordingly.
When we do go live, the expected procedure should be as follows:
1) Take the current sites offline and freeze the beta sites.
2) Sync the content from the beta sites down to our development server.
3) Export the legacy data from the current sites and import them into the new sites on our development server.
4) Upload both sites to the new dedicated server.
5) Redirect the domains to point to the new server, and wait for the DNS changes to propagate.
In preparation for #5, I recommend you set the cache time for both domains to an hour a few days before the switch over. (The default cache time is a few days.) That will minimize the delay for the new servers to become active.
Cheers.