We are pleased to announce that Alto 5.5.1 is now available on general release to all customers.

You will find the Release Notices and supporting documentation for this release on the MySupport Portal or on our web site at http://librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/customer_area/alto/.

Please ensure that you download and read the relevant documentation for your operating system prior to downloading the installation wraps.

Key features within Alto 5.5.1 are:

• Obsolete borrower types, item types and item formats can now be suppressed, so they are not visible within Alto.
• A number of defects have been fixed
• Authority and bibliographic MARC description files have been amended to include the latest MARC format updates.
• A new environment variable  is included for the use of libraries experiencing a problem with reservation charges not being generated when a reserved item is collected.
• Ad hoc emails can now be sent via LDS, if the Alto client PC is not able to communicate directly with the SMTP server.

There have been some changes to the MarcService to prevent it stopping unexpectedly. If you have had problems with this service please raise a case and we will supply you with the latest version.

To minimise end user disruption, if you haven’t already upgraded to Alto 5.5 we recommend that you upgrade straight to Alto 5.5.1.  You must still load each server upgrade in turn, including 5.4.1, but you need to load only the latest (5.5.1) version of the client software.

Don’t forget that for the main Alto 5.5 you need to schedule your upgrade with Capita Support, so that the files can be released to you and LDS can be upgraded.