The eagle-eyed amongst you spotted that we made some changes very early this year, but that we didn’t publish a release notice. So here’s me coming clean on our early January release.

We released a number of under-the-bonnet changes on 6 January, this was a maintenance release to do some internal improvements and also to trial some new functionality with one of our academic customers.

A few months back the academic libraries told us how important it would be for them to have the same View My Account sign-in links from their portal that they currently have in Prism 2. We blogged about Portal Single Sign-On after that webinar and committed to getting something in place for now. This release includes the necessary pieces in Prism 3 to allow single sign-on links in the portal to be re-configured for Prism 3. We’re testing that with one of our large academics right now and will be able to make that available to everyone soon. If you are an academic library who wants to go live with Prism 3 now that portal sign-on links are available, please let your account manager know.

Another important feature for several of you out there is the ability to configure the search sort ordering. This release includes the ability to configure the sort drop down according to your own needs. We’ve configured all of you with the original out-of-the-box settings for Prism 3, so nothing has changed in your tenancies and we have been testing a different set of options with one of our academic customers. At the moment this is only configurable by the development team, not via the admin interface, so we have limited capacity to make these changes right now. If you have an immediate need to alter your sort options then please log a support call for the change.

Under the bonnet we also made some improvements in the way we handle page rendering, this was to reduce load on our servers, allowing more customers to go live and keeping the costs of running the service down. This improvement has also made a small difference to page load times across Prism 3.

If you have any questions on this or other issues feel free to email me Alison.Kershaw@talis.com or your account manager. Or comment here, of course.