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.

Following feedback from the Talis Prism 3 webinars held last month, we identified a difference between the Single Sign On shown on the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap, and the immediate requirement to replicate the Talis Prism 2 Single Sign On with Talis Keystone View My Account (VMA). We have investigated this, and look to run this as a Consultancy project, but would like to organise a webinar to validate requirements and identify customers who would be willing to test this with us.

To register for this session on Tuesday 1st September at 1:30pm, please email Alison Kershaw stating that you would like to attend, we will then send you details on how to register.

Talis would like to invite you to attend a webinar on Wednesday 2^nd September to further discuss the Cross-Searching Multiple Catalogues requirement, and how we can look to move this forward as it currently isn’t addressed within the programme of work outline on the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap.

This webinar has been designed to understand the Cross-Searching Multiple Catalogues  requirements, and you should look to register if you have used the  Z39.50 search in Talis Prism 2. To register for this session on Wednesday 2^nd September at 1pm, please email Alison Kershaw stating that you would like to attend, we will then send you details on how to register. Please do pass this invite to colleagues who you feel may be interested in attending.

Following positive feedback from the recent Talis Prism 3 Development Update Webinars, we are looking to run the next one in the series on the 9th September.

This webinar will focus again on discussing updates to the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap, but also look to explain Juice extension framework in further detail and provide an overview of the Talis Prism 3 Administration Interface.

To register for this session on Wednesday 9th September, please email Alison Kershaw stating that you would like to attend, we will then send you details on how to register.

Following the Talis Prism 3 development Update Webinars held earlier this month, we have published the August Talis Prism 3 Roadmap.

As discussed on the webinar, the roadmap details the themes that we are looking to focus development effort on during a specified period over the next 12 months.

If you were unable to attend a webinar and would like a more detailed explanation around the roadmap, or have any questions, then please contact Alison.Kershaw@Talis.com.

One of the things I’ve been asked about most over the past few weeks is Juice, and by implication, extending Talis Prism 3. Let me try to explain…

One of the principles underpinning Talis Prism 3 is its ability to grow and do new stuff. There’s a lot we’re doing under the hood to allow us to add new features in our regular releases, but we also want you to be able to play too. We want your web development teams to add cool new features for your institution and to share those with each other.

To do that, we’ve made it so that you can add your own JavaScript to Talis Prism 3 pages, extending them with new features and integrating them with other systems you have.

Using simple JavaScript extensions you could add in Google Maps showing where your branches are. You could bring pricing information from Amazon into your pages, or reviews from LibraryThing. Maybe you’d like to include a floormap of where to find a book in the shelves or embed videos from Meet the Author.

All of these things are possible by adding your own JavaScript extensions to Talis Prism 3.

Of course, most of the things people want to do when extending Talis Prism 3 have things in common. You want to get some information out of the page, do something with it (like query Amazon) and then put something back into the page for the user. That’s where your developers might
find Juice useful.

Juice is not a product and is not part of Talis Prism 3. Juice stands for Javascript User Interface Componentised Extensions. It’s an open-source project started by Richard Wallis to help people extend web-based applications more easily. You can use it to extend any web app where you can add some JavaScript in. Conversely you can extend Talis Prism 3 without using Juice.

Juice has been designed to make it easier to extract information from a page, query other services with that info and then add more information back into the page for the user to work with. As that’s what many extensions will want to do, Talis Prism 3 and Juice make a great combination.

As Talis Prism 3 continues to develop we’ll be adding in more features to allow you to extend it. RSS feeds of searches and a full Linked Data API to get at your catalogue data in other applications are both planned.

If you have ideas on extending Talis Prism 3 for yourselves and want some help, give Richard a shout. He’s always looking out for new ideas and to help people make them real.

Following the success of the Talis Prism 3 Development Update Webinar on Thursday 23rd July we would like to run this session again for people who missed it due to the short notice, or were away. This Webinar has been designed to enable Talis to discuss Talis Prism 3 development and the updated roadmap in detail. This session has been designed to answer your specific questions and enable you to hear other libraries experience.

To register for this session on Thursday 6th August at 1pm, please email Alison Kershaw (Alison.kershaw@talis.com) stating that you would like to attend, we will then send you details on how to register.

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.

Talis would like to invite you to attend a Webinar on Thursday 23rd July at 2pm so that we can discuss Talis Prism 3 development and the updated roadmap in detail. This session has been designed to answer your specific questions and enable you to hear other libraries experience.

To register, please email Alison Kershaw (Alison.kershaw@talis.com) stating that you would like to attend, so that we can send you details on how to access this.

Talis plans to run the webinars on a monthly basis so as to keep you updated on Talis Prism 3 development and roadmap; if you can’t attend this first webinar then keep an eye on the blog and forums as we will publicise dates for these monthly updates, as well as Talis Prism 3 developments.