MDID3 Status

To the MDID User Community:

Please note that the recently released version of MDID3 is a pre-production release and as such should NOT be used in a production environment. Our intention with this release is to give interested members of the MDID community a preview of how MDID3 will look and work. This version of MDID3 is not meant to replace MDID2 at this time. We are still actively developing important features; such as remote collection sharing, remote collection searching, presentation packaging, user management, streaming video, a desktop version of the ImageViewer, etc.

During the fall semester at JMU, we will run both MDID2 and MDID3, using the migration tool to periodically copy MDID2 data into MDID3. Faculty and students will experiment with MDID3 but will rely on MDID2 for course-critical work. Our plan at JMU is to have a full-featured ImageViewer (with dual screen support) in the classroom by the end of September and a production-ready version of MDID3 online by the end of this year.

In a previous message, we suggested some steps your institution can take to prepare for migration from MDID 2 to MDID 3. Administrators should document any customizations, including custom user authentication. Curators should clean up collection metadata fields and map as many fields as possible to the relevant Dublin Core fields. The MDID 3 migration tool will copy users, groups, collections, records, etc. Due to differences in data structures and permissions, the results of the migration need to be reviewed before the new system is put into production, but none of the user data stored in MDID 2 should be lost.

Thank you for your continued interest in the MDID system and your support for our development efforts.

Instructions for Installing MDID3 on Windows 2008

Instructions for installing MDID3 on Windows 2008 are now available. Also look at Upgrading from MDID2.

MDID3 is still in development. A number of features required for use in a live production environment are not yet complete.  These include remote collection sharing, remote collection searching, presentation packaging, user management, streaming video, etc.  We recommend that you continue to use (or start using) MDID2 in production until these features are completed. To make this easy, we are distributing MDID3 with a migration tool that allows you to periodically copy your MDID2 data into MDID3 (note that data cannot be copied from MDID3 to MDID2). In this way you can run both versions in parallel for the purposes of evaluating and testing MDID3.

Please report bugs in the software or problems with the installation instructions to mdid@jmu.edu.  We ask everybody to refrain from submitting new feature requests or asking about release dates for particular features at this time.  We will announce new features as they become available. Upgrading MDID3 from one version to a newer version will be easy.