Development Updates

July was marked by several exciting achievements. After completing extensive testing of Avalon 3.1 during Sprint 55, the team released Avalon 3.1 to the community. Northwestern University successfully implemented the new release on their production server, and Indiana updated their pilot server as well. The following sprint had the highest velocity to date. For those interested in our statistics, the team earned a total of 96 story points! 

We’re pleased to announce the release of Avalon 3.1. The major goal for our first dot release is to pave the way for production implementations of the Avalon Media System at Northwestern University and Indiana University, the Avalon software development partners. We’ve achieved production at Northwestern University and are looking forward to taking this next step at Indiana University.

Release 3.1 adds the following capabilities:

The Avalon team has been busy balancing improvements, testing the Avalon 3.1 source code, and eliminating bugs in preparation for our next release. Avalon html pages have been updated with search engine optimization metadata and microdata to increase the clarity and usefulness of information provided in Google search results about Avalon media items. We’ve also updated the Avalon Collections Guide wiki page to reflect the new features of our upcoming release.

In Sprint 53, the Avalon team completed work on LDAP-based access control and made significant improvements to the error messages generated by the batch ingest process. We’re working to strengthen the information provided about Avalon media items in Google search results with Schema.org and Google Webmaster Tools serving as our main resources in this process. 

Since the release of Avalon 3.0, the team has focused on putting Avalon in production at Northwestern University as well as adding features needed for IU’s move to production. We expect to implement and release the latest features by the end of June as a minor release 3.1.

Release 3.0 of the Avalon Media System is now available. Both Indiana University and Northwestern University will be using this release to set up production environments and we hope other institutions will join us.

Release 3.0 adds the following capabilities:

• provide authorization for item access from your learning management system by integrating Avalon as an LTI tool (Learning Tools Interoperability is a standard used by many course management systems)

We have an Avalon release candidate! We've tested and tagged the code and completed technical documentation about how to configure permalinks integration. We had new eyes look at our manual installation process. Since our production environments are going to look different from your production environments, standalone instructions for the various components such as Fedora, MySQL, Solr, Red5, Matterhorn and others have been provided to help get Avalon users up and running without too much trouble.  

We have been a little delayed in posting our last two sprint demos but the delay was worth the wait. During the last month, the Avalon team has been nailing down some pretty impressive features prior to our next release.