We’re pleased to announce that the recent preview release of Talis Prism 3 has now been deployed to the live service.  For full details on what has changed in this release please visit the preview release notice here: //blogs.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/prism/2010/10/29/prism-3-release-preview-october-2010/.

If you have questions on this, or any other issue, please feel free to email phil.john@talis.com, contact your account manager, or leave a comment on the blog.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview.

This release comprises the following changes:

• The culmination of a large unit of work focussing on performance
• A bug fix for customers with own hostnames, allowing them to view items in their sandbox tenancy.

As with all previous releases, these changes can be tested by using the demo version of your site. For customers using the “prism.talis.com” domain, this is accessed by putting “demo/” just before your tenancy name, e.g.:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/

For customers with own hostname enabled, the “demo/” is placed at the end of your URL, e.g.:

http://catalogue.sunderland.ac.uk/demo/

If you have questions on this, or any other issue, please feel free to email phil.john@talis.com, contact your account manager, or leave a comment on the blog.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

We’ve released this a little earlier than we normally would to ensure that certain features were out in time for our academic customers entering the start of a new semester.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview; this release contains some essential precursors for introducing the Semantic Data Model, as well as several other under-the-bonnet tweaks.

The biggest change in this release is a new session tracking system. By tweaking how we handle “my account” sessions, we’ve been able make some changes which will allow us to further improve performance in Prism 3 going forward.

We’ve also enabled Talis Aspire integration, allowing those of you with our next-generation resource list management system to flag what lists an item appears on. If your institution uses Talis Aspire and you would like us to enable this integration, please raise a support request and we will make the necessary configuration changes.

For those of you undertaking your own styling, we’ve introduced a new theme fragment for placing all JavaScript includes; this allows us to control when they are sent to the browser, optimising the performance of your Prism 3 tenancy.

Finally, this version contains the first release of the Semantic Data Model. This will be trialled with several beta customers before being made more widely available. The work released today includes the new “Format” and “Content” facets, as well as display of Alternate Graphic Representation (MARC21 field 880) on item pages. Here’s a sneak preview of this new feature:

Main record representation

Alternate graphic representation shown after clicking on the "Chinese" tab.

As you can see, this release contains quite a lot of “under-the-bonnet” work so we’d really appreciate it if you can all cast an eye over your tenancies. To view the release preview, simply place /demo/ after the prism.talis.com part of your url, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, please feel free to email me (Phil.John@talis.com) or your account manager (or comment here, of course).

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

This release enables us to widen availability of the Admin Console, please contact support and raise a service request if you would like us to set up credentials for you.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for customers to preview; as well as a small under the hood change to improve “My Account” page rendering times, this version contains a few tweaks to the search system:

• Facets now persist when changing sort order
• Exact searches no longer widen terms to include stemmed versions
• New “series:” index name enabled
• Other small tweaks to improve the relevance of certain searches

Finally, we’ve included a method for customers who are currently using the Admin Console to force through changes immediately; this will allow us to widen availability to all customers with Prism 3.

You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).

At the Talis Prism 3 User Day back in March, we announced we’d be implementing a system for you to suggest new ideas and features; I am pleased to announce that Talis Library Ideas has now been launched. We’ve decided to use the same system as Talis Aspire, our Resource List Management System, so accounts can be shared between them.

Talis Library Ideas is the voice of the customer group. It allows you to raise new ideas for Prism and for the community to develop a shared understanding of what that idea involves, the goals it meets for your end users and to set its priority through the voting system.

That is not to say we will action all ideas. There are many competing priorities, particularly with the roadmap themes. It may be the idea will prompt a theme of its own, or contribute to a theme we’re already considering. However it ensures the idea is visible.

Each of you have a pool of ten votes to promote ideas, and up to three can be used on a single idea to give a personal weighting (somewhat important, important or very important). When ideas are either accepted or declined, votes are returned, allowing you to redistribute them.

To signup for an account please visit http://ideas.talis.com and click on the “Signup” link at the top of the page. So that it’s fair, we will approve one account from each instituition.  I’ll provide an overview of Talis Library Ideas during the Prism 3 Webinar next week, but if anyone has any questions in the interim you can either email me at Phil.John@talis.com, or comment here.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release to demo has now been released to the Live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please click here.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of admin.talis.com to an initial group of customers. We’re going to run through a programme of workflows and tests with their assistance.

Once we’ve completed this testing, and we’re satisfied everything works as intended, we’ll start enabling more tenancies. Please keep watching for announcements here, and through other channels, for more information.

In the interim, if you require any configuration changes to your tenancy, please raise a service request and we’ll do them as quickly as possible.

We’re going to release the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview next week. This release will mark the completion of the four remaining Q1 roadmap items:

• Improvements in display of availability information
• Admin console
• New stock search
• Own host name

In light of the size of some changes, and because of the Easter break, we’re going to allow more time for everyone to preview the release.

The most visible change is the improvement in display of availability information, detailed on the blog back in January. This replaces the previous availability summary with a much more comprehensive and usable set of statements and can be expanded to provide item level details for each location. As with other aspects of Prism 3, the new availability can be styled to suit your needs using CSS so you can match the new functionality to your own style as you see fit.

The change also makes the reservations functionality more prominent and re-styles the ‘find more by’ functionality. As this has changed the markup of the right hand content you should check any extensions you have that put content into this area.

The new stock search feature provides a way to provide the same information as many of the Prism 2 prepared searches you run. To do this requires more data from your local systems so will mean a small upgrade to MarcGrabber, we are currently testing with a small number of customers. Please contact support if you’d like to get new stock searches set up for your catalogue.

We’ve also completed final testing on the admin console and are releasing this to an initial set of customers, before making the deployment more widespread.

The final roadmap element, own hostname, will require some consideration if you choose to take it up. Some things to bear in mind are the requirement for a security certificate for those parts of the site that contain personal details of your borrowers as well as making sure your DNS provider sets up a record for your domain. If you’d like to enable the own hostname feature then please contact your account manager who can talk you through each of the steps required.

As well as the roadmap items, this release also contains some other small fixes and changes, namely:

• The advanced search link no longer carries through the default text
• Non-latin characters/diacritics now display correctly, this was a fonts issue on Windows machines which we have fixed. If your styling specifies different fonts to the Prism defaults then you may need to review your styling also.
• Meaningful browser title for search and item pages (this makes it easier to distinguish different bookmarked searches and catalogue items)
• Special characters in searches no longer cause the search to fail

As you can see, this is a substantial release and so we would urge you all to try out the preview. You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this or other issues feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).