Posted from an email sent to the NExpress listserv by Mickey Coalwell yesterday:
Hello everybody.
As Jim mentioned in his July 13 email, big changes are (finally) coming to NExpress. LibLime, our support and hosting company, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of PTFS, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. We have been working with the PTFS transition team over the last few months, and have negotiated an upgrade path that allows us to continue with our fall migration of Leavenworth Public Library into the NExpress Shared Regional Catalog.
Our current Koha installation will be upgraded with a newer code base which includes over a year of changes and improvements in both functionality and features, including some PTFS software enhancements.
We have a schedule now for this upgrade process, which will occur on Saturday, August 14 & Sunday, August 15. LibLime will do a database backup, and then run the upgrade scripts, which take about 2 hours. Once LibLime has confirmed that the scripts have run successfully, the last step is the reindexing, which will take 6-7 hours. LibLime is planning on doing the upgrade after hours on Saturday and Sunday, so there will be no need for offline circulation. It will take approximately 10+ hours to complete the upgrade over the weekend. Please do not do any catalog work during this period.
We should have a test instance of the new PTFS Master Koha available for our use very soon. LibLime will refresh our test instance with an up-to-date copy of our production database and upgrade it to PTFS Master. We should have several weeks to “play” and get used to the way it works in a test environment.
We are working now on developing training and support materials highlighting the many new features of the upgraded PTFS Master Koha. We think you’ll be very pleased with the changes!
We have already had a successful preliminary upload of Leavenworth’s data into an upgraded instance, which we are busy testing. Leavenworth Public Library is on track to join NExpress “live” on September 8. Leavenworth will bring almost 100,000 new items into our shared catalog.
Thank you all for your patience. We are very pleased to be moving ahead with this major Koha upgrade, and will do everything we can to make the process a smooth one.