The CollectionSpace team has been hard at work since early July on version 4.0. Most bugs in this significant new release have been squashed, and we're hoping to invite you and others in the community to try out this new release soon, with QA testing most likely to begin later this week. The major changes in this release, rating its "4.0" designation, involve streamlining and simplifying the process through which you configure fields in CollectionSpace's main record types. These changes will in many cases allow you to add new fields specific to your museum and/or community of practice, or to change the behavior of existing fields, much more easily. There's also a new Work authority, for managing terms referring to specific cultural works; as well as ongoing bugfixes to continue to improve your experience with the system. More details about what's new in CollectionSpace 4.0: http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Release+4.0 Aron Roberts UC Berkeley

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Aron Roberts <aron@socrates.berkeley.edu> wrote: > The CollectionSpace team has been hard at work since early July on > version 4.0. > > Most bugs in this significant new release have been squashed, and > we're hoping to invite you and others in the community to try out this > new release soon, with QA testing most likely to begin later this > week. Our current plan is to open QA testing to the community during the second half of next week, September 11-13, 2013. We'll keep you updated as we approach that target. Aron Roberts UC Berkeley P.S. We've been conducting in-house testing of version 4.0 over the past several weeks, and most recently, through a test migration from version 3.3 to version 4.0 of what is certainly the largest and may also be the most complex CollectionSpace implementation to date, for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA), "the oldest and largest anthropological collection in the Western United States." This has resulted in identifying several more bugs that we hope to fix prior to the onset of testing. You can track progress on those bugs here: http://issues.collectionspace.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=14970 > > The major changes in this release, rating its "4.0" designation, > involve streamlining and simplifying the process through which you > configure fields in CollectionSpace's main record types. These > changes will in many cases allow you to add new fields specific to > your museum and/or community of practice, or to change the behavior of > existing fields, much more easily. > > There's also a new Work authority, for managing terms referring to > specific cultural works; as well as ongoing bugfixes to continue to > improve your experience with the system. > > More details about what's new in CollectionSpace 4.0: > http://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Release+4.0 > > Aron Roberts > UC Berkeley