Equinox has committed the month of July to making some big improvements in Evergreen's acquisitions module. Good news!  They are working on 

• EDI Invoicing
• EDI enhanced/enriched ordering
• Support for multiple PO handling
• Better end-of-year handling of unencumbered funds
• Ability to block purchase orders for items with zero copies
• Better page navigation/handling for selection lists, POs, and invoices

In case you haven't seen it, here's the schedule for the Evergreen Conference (official site is http://evergreen2012.org/) that will be held in Indianpolis, Indiana April 25 to April 28:

Wednesday, 4/25

Wednesday, 4/25
8:00-10:00 Registration Open
9:00-12:00 Hackfest
10:30-12:00 Web Team / Communications Committee meeting
12:00-1:00 Lunch on your own
1:00-4:30 Exhibits open
1:00-4:30 Hackfest
1:00-2:30 Cataloging Working Group
1:00-2:30 DIG Interest Group
1:00-2:30 Reports Interest Group
2:30-3:00 Afternoon snack break by EBSCO Publishing
3:00-4:30 System Admin Interest Group
3:00-4:30 Training Interest Group
4:30-6:00 Vendor reception co-hosted by Backstage Library Works and Google

We're in the middle of a bit of a redesign of the RSCEL website.  Trying to simplify it and not duplicate information here that you can find on the evergreen-ils.org website.

One thing we're planning to keep alive is an Evergreen directory (aka the Evergreen Initiatives). It is a directory that you can choose to put your organization into for the purposes of facilitating networking between Evergreen libraries and Evergreen community members.

For the moment...it is here:

http://rscel.evergreen-ils.org/evergreen/about/projects

Ever wondered where the logs from the Evergreen IRC channel live?  Well, I just found them.  Here they are:

http://open-ils.org/irc_logs/evergreen

Seems like printer problems often come up on the Evergreen mailing list so I thought I'd pull out this little exchange that seems to solve the problems with at least one printer, the SP200. May be be relevant to Evergreen 1.6 only but if you have an SP200, you'll probably want to check out this quick fix!

Hello,
Is anyone printing to a Star SP200 receipt printer using Evergreen 2.1? If you can print successfully to the SP200 from Evergreen can you tell me the driver you are using? We have tried the sp212 driver but have not had success.The printer uses a USB connection.

Good news for all Evergreen Users!

The Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Evergreen project as its newest member. Evergreen joins twenty-six other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.

Conservancy and the Evergreen community, including librarians, developers, and documenters, are excited to announce that Evergreen is now a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

By joining the Conservancy, Evergreen obtains the benefits of a formal non-profit organizational structure while keeping the project focused on software development and documentation. Some benefits of joining the Conservancy include the ability to collect donations, hold assets on behalf of the project, and some protection of the lead developers of the project from personal liability when engaging in the activities of the project.

Marshall Breeding has published the results of his ILS satisfaction survey, Perceptions 2010.  

This year two open source ILS products earned top marks. OPALS, targeting K-12 school libraries and Koha when supported by ByWater Solutions.

 Marshall Breeding announced the results of his 2010 ILS Survey and two of the big winners in this year's report are Koha and Evergreen.  And, interestingly, the big loser was none other than SirsiDynix.  

Grace Dunbar of Equinox recently posted a note to the Documentation List a link to the first draft of Release Notes for 2.0.

They are available here:  http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=feature_list_2_0

I tried to update the KCLS Requirements to reflect those that made it in 2.0 but I only got as far as the circulation requirements!  Some are clearly the same requirements and others have changed a bit so it was a bit hard to match.  

Lots of great, new features in 2.0!!!  If you want to try it out, the source code is available here:  http://www.open-ils.org/downloads.php.  Currently on alpha 5 release.  Beta will be next!

Other people have struggled with how to get fines and fees into Evergreen from their old system.  So I thought many would benefit from seeing how KCLS handled fines and fees in their migration from Millennium to Evergreen.