Sprint

VM images, content and licensing, oh my! The release candidate is just about ready to be shared with everyone. Final tweaks and testing are happening! If you want to see the stories that we are working on each sprint, check out the current sprint page on our wiki.

Click here to watch the full recording of this week's demo. 

Only three more stories need to be completed before Release 1! This last sprint focused on ways to deploy Avalon to institutions that want to test Avalon for their media management needs. The team has fixed the final bugs to improve quality of playback. We are very close to Release 1, so keep your eyes on this blog, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news!  

We are rapidly approaching R1 (as Jon Dunn and Mark Notess noted in this week's brown bag talk, "Any day now!"). We have hit feature freeze and the team is now identifying and fixing bugs in the system. We are working hard on installation and configuration scripts for our partners and other institutions. The team is also compiling a collection manager's guide to help explain Avalon features, functionality, and how to navigate the system. 

This week the team focused on adding the last of bit of new functionality before R1. Avalon will now be able to work with Red5 and Adobe Streaming Servers. More work was completed to make Avalon pleasing to the eye. Next we'll be turning our attention to user testing, preparing for installations at other institutions and smoothing out any bumps the team comes across along the way. Things are really cooking now! 

The Avalon Media System is looking like a real system this week!  The focus of this sprint was to improve the look and feel of Avalon; to that end, lots of progress was made toward refining the overall user interface. Work on the Item Access and Group Management pages was especially fruitful.

During our last Sprint, the Avalon team was very successful in continuing to add functionality to the system. Some of the highlights of the Sprint are that users have the ability to upload full length films and can now choose the playback bitrate for videos. Collection information can now be associated with an item from the web interface as well as during batch uploads.