It's 9am and the libraries are opening here in King County and guess what...they are running their AMH equipment and checking in material!

Patrons are using the 24/7 automated check-in units, Preston is still sorting all the transit items, tote check-in is happening.  This is a big step forward and you can feel the excitement starting to build.

And that's not all. Besides the ESI team that is in the war room (aka 3C), there is more development happening as we speak from Georgia.  For example, I sat in on a meeting with Shae (ESI) and Anne Hansberry (Library Technician from Selections and Orders). They were working on finalizing the Purchase Alert Reports using some of the new acquisitions module.  Anne was loving what she saw.  She described what she had to go through to do Purchase Alert Reports in the old system and it was pretty gnarly.  

Anne on camera...about new Purchase Alert Report functionality.

And speaking of development, I realize I've been talking a lot of fixing this and tweaking that and troubleshooting and more troubleshooting.  But the truth of the matter is that much of what is happening is still just-in-time development.  Bill Ptacek has been pretty clear about being unwilling to push out the go-live date and so they aren't.  And that means that some things aren't finished and so part of this go live process has been managing priorities without stopping progress.  That's why checkout was working for almost a day before check-in was happening.  There were some development that literally happened while they waited (e.g. certain notices hadn't gotten done that KCLS had to have before they would allow check-in to begin).  And then once it started, there were the usual migration related tweaks. 

Now that check-out AND check-in in going great guns, the staff in receiving are getting started.  Cataloging will be next in line.  And did you know that EDI support is now developed?! Acquisitions is fully functional as well (per Jed who has been working closely with his technical services team) but KCLS won't be using it too much until they close out the current year.

So, you may ask, where are the fruits of all this development? The answer is that much of it is already in trunk, and if it isn't there now, it will be very soon.  None of this work is being held back.  There is no KCLS fork.  This is all Evergreen and anyone who knows how to download from trunk will be able to get at this code in very short order.   

Okay, I've stalled on this update for an hour and half to make sure that going live with check-in and check-out at all 45 libraries (including their AMH systems in the libraries) on top of the Preston Distribution Center (cranking through their 8000 items per hour) is handling the load.  So far so good.

Here's what Lee, the engineer at ESI who is monitoring the databases, says:

Evergreen and Handling KCLS Transactions in Production