The enhancement ballot for Voyager 9.0 closed at the end of March, with over 6,600 votes recorded – a really positive outcome that allowed Voyager customers to express their priorities for development. The IGeLU PWG have worked closely with our counterparts in ELUNA to analyse the results and put forward recommendations for the top 20 projects for inclusion in the core Voyager software. In addition we have provided a prioritized list of enhancements for Media Scheduling, to ensure that some of the smaller Voyager add-ons receive an appropriate amount of development time.
In an attempt to speed up the process PWG members are working with Mike Dicus via a series of Webex calls to help analyze the requests and determine how the enhancements might be best included.
Meanwhile the PWG are pleased to see continued development happening with Voyager 8. A new service pack (8.1.2) is planned for release in July, and Voyager 8.2 – which includes the highest-ranked enhancements voted for in our last round in 2010 – is scheduled for release in Q4. Development is almost finished and field-testing will start soon. This features an XML patron loader, patron web services, and new indexes to accommodate RDA. There are a number of other smaller enhancements and members from both the ELUNA and IGeLU PWGs recently took part in a Webex, where Mike Dicus, the Voyager Product Manager showed many of the exciting new features that came out of the last enhancements process.
Ray Delahunty, Voyager PWG Coordinator