In early March, Ex Libris invited the PALNI Project Team to assist with their early testing of the Version 19 release of Aleph. Aleph V.19 has reached the mid-point of its development cycle, and is currently slated by Ex Libris for initial release by the end of 2007. Ex Libris expressed particular interest in having a consortial customer like PALNI to help with their testing. It is also noteworthy that Ex Libris is planning to use the test database that PALNI provided them nine months ago for some of their Version 19 testing.

As Kathryn Harnish, Ex Libris's Director of ILS Product Management, explains,

One of the new things that we've done with several other products is to invite customers to the office in Jerusalem to participate in some pre-release testing. The development team and I feel that it would be beneficial to have one of our consortial customers join us for a few days of ALEPH testing. My colleagues had suggested PALNI as a potential partner for this activity -- they value your knowledge and expertise, plus I believe we have some of your data loaded that we could test with.

After discussing their request in detail with Ms. Harnish, we were happy to make Susan Fipps, PALNI Systems Analyst, available for one week this Spring to help with V. 19 testing. Susan's participation will help to insure the quality of Ex Libris' next Aleph release, will give us a better understanding of Ex Libris' development and testing process, and will give PALNI an advance look at the capabilities of Aleph V.19 using a copy of PALNI's own database. Susan is scheduled to fly to Jerusalem on April 26, and will be working with the Ex Libris development team on the V. 19 testing from April 29 through May 2.

In light of our participation in the Aleph V. 19 development process, staff have recommended to the PALNI EC and Board that we postpone our previously planned Aleph upgrade from Summer, 2007, and instead work towards a V. 19 upgrade during the Summer, 2008. Ideally, we will be able to install V. 19 on the PALNI test server in early 2008, and then work towards an installation and full roll-out of the new release on the PALNI production server during the Summer, 2008.