Today we released to the live service the changes relating to hotlinks, availability information and more that we described in the preview announcement.

The associated upgrade to the Local Data Services (LDS) is currently being deployed to all the customers who registered for it, and the benefits have been warmly welcomed. If you haven’t already, but would like to register then please email Alison Kershaw.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and announcements please visit the Talis Prism 3 Microsite.

This latest release of Talis Prism 3, which is now available for customers to preview, combines with an upgrade to the Local Data Services (LDS) to improve the user experience in some key areas:

* Hotlinks display in the Availability area for all e-resources, not just e-journals
* Copies whose status is not In Stock (e.g. On Order, In Processing, etc), now always display separately in the Availability area
* Change PIN now copes with certain anomalous data conditions
* The My Account page focus is now in the barcode input box, allowing the user to start typing immediately.

The improvement in the Availability area represents early delivery of some of the work planned on the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap for the period beginning in September; there will be more work done on Availability at that time. The other features demonstrate our commitment to spending part of the development effort on addressing bug fixes and customer priorities, in addition to the Roadmap themes.

The LDS upgrade is needed to experience the benefit of the first three features. It is being deployed by Talis into customers’ local environments. The Talis Prism release will function with the current LDS. To register for your LDS upgrade, please email Alison Kershaw.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Wednesday 26th August 2009.

Find out more about Talis Prism 3 on the Talis Prism 3 Microsite.

Today’s release includes more textual improvements to the Welsh language interface, and increased stability of user sessions, as described when we announced its preview.

Customers with Talis Prism 3 have been able to preview this change against their own catalogues, and the release now makes it live for all of them.

This release includes:

• More textual improvements to the Welsh language interface
• Increased stability of user sessions, meaning a reduction in the errors that sometimes occur in borrower services such as renew, reserve and cancel reservation.

Customers with Talis Prism 3 are now able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Tuesday 21st July.

This release fixes a problem where Hotlink URLs as displayed in Talis Prism Availability did not work when they contained an ampersand.

Customers with Prism 3 have been able to preview this change against their own catalogues, and the release now makes it live for all of them.

Today we are pleased to release to the live service the Welsh translation work and other changes described in an earlier post.

The live customers have been able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software. Both the preview and the live release become available to all Prism 3 customers for no effort on their part – a benefit of the Software as a Service model of Prism 3.

We’d love to hear what you think of Prism 3, either in comments to this blog post or in the Prism forum.

The main focus of this release is a full Welsh translation. Building on earlier foundation work for handling translations and in collaboration with some customers, Talis Prism can now be configured to offer users the option to view it in English or Welsh and to easily switch between them. Additionally, we have provided a language entry point so that the user can choose their language preference on a preliminary page before entering Talis Prism.

More detailed logging of timings in Talis Prism has been included to help us target the most productive areas for performance improvements

Finally, we have included fixes to bugs with the ‘Print’ option and the ‘Availability’ link under ‘Get this item’ on the Item Detail page.

Customers with Prism 3 are now able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Tuesday 23rd June.

This release fixes a problem inadvertently introduced last week where the Electronic Location and Access field (MARC field 856), which should display in the Details area of the Item Detail page, was no longer displaying.

The fix is immediately active for all customers.

Today we’re pleased to announce the release to the live service of some core developments that are required to provide the foundation for planned functionality as outlined in our Prism Roadmap. In addition, this release fixes some issues affecting links in the ‘Find more by…’ area of the Item details page.

The live customers have been able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software. Both the preview and the live release become available to all Prism 3 customers for no effort on their part – a benefit of the Software as a Service model of Prism 3.

We’d love to hear what you think of Prism 3, either in comments to this blog post or in the Prism forum.

The value of our Software as a Service approach was proved again when an issue was found during the release  preview that was made available to Prism 3 customers last week. As well as showing the value of the release process it demonstrates its flexibility, allowing adjustments, and the approach of continual improvement at no deployment cost to customers .

Today’s release for preview fixes the issue and includes further foundation work to make the management of interface languages much easier and more effective.

Release to the live service is now scheduled for Wednesday 13th May.