Our roadmap for eHive outlines the main features planned over the next 18 months. The features are listed in the planned order of implementation. If you have software suggestions, please post them in the Software Feedback and Suggestions section of the eHive forum. The forum provides a place to discuss issues and enhancements in greater detail.

The roadmap will be updated as enhancements are completed. Planned features may change based on further research or based on feedback from the eHive community.

 

Planned Enhancements

Application Programmable Interface (API)

Programmatic interface to account, object and community information for connecting eHive data with third party software and website. The initial API for cover the key public access functions for searching, exploring and browsing public data. The initial API will be HTTP REST style returning XML data, followed by support for Open Search, and then support for data harvesting of Dublin Core XML via Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PHM). This is now almost complete and has been used as the foundation for our eHive Wordpress plugins.

Wordpress Plugins

Develop Wordpress plugins to allow museums to create their own websites with embedded collection search and explore functions powered by eHive. This is now in a beta phase, with several websites in development based on the new plugins. Our Rugby Moments website is one example.

Instant Museum Website

A turnkey driven website to provide searching and exploring of object records within a separate branded website. This is likely to be a pre-configured hosted Wordpress site, where the appropriate plugins have already been set up and a default menu has been created. Just click a button, wait for the instant site to be generated, then get straight into updating your general museum information!

Standard Reports

Additional standard object based reports are planned to cover basic collections management functions. We'll be releasing one new report approximately monthly. The logged reports, in the current planned release order, are:

Acquisition Lot Reports

• Entry Receipts
• Deed of Gift and Thank You letters

Object Reports

• Listing Report (key fields in columns)
• Valuation Report
• Deaccession Summary Report
• Deaccession Report - Single object
• Copyright Summary Report
• Acquisition Summary Report
• Acquisition Details - Single object
• Condition Report - Single object
• Condition Form - Single object
• Condtion Summary Report
• Treatment Report - Single object
• Treatment Form - Single object
• Treatment Summary Report

Blank Forms (Single Object)

• Catalogue sheet (per object type) - possibly separate blank forms for public, core and detailed cataloguing.
• Copyright details
• Copyright permissions form

Create screen enhancements

The images upload section will be separated onto its own tab.

Improve navigation of long drop down lists either by adding the option to skip down the list by typing the first letter(s) of the term or by allowing simple searches.

Import Tool

User driven import tool for importing object data and images from other applications.

Dublin Core

Export to Dublin Core XML format

Person, Place and Document

Add support for other related record types, including people, organisations, places and documents.

Saved Lists

Options to select records from search results and add them to save lists (favourites). This will provide the basis for accounts holders to create their own public highlight lists for their profile page, plus options for creating virtual exhibitions of objects that may be from many museums.

Security Levels

Provide multiple logins into one account with different levels of access. Security levels will control access to areas such as account administration functions and pick list maintenance.

Past Updates

Updates to eHive are made approximately every 2-6 weeks and are described in the News - Notices section of the website.

9 December 2011 - 3.2.1

Automated emails when accounts near their storage limit. Minor fixes for new reporting tool.

17 November 2011 - 3.2

Reports have been rebuilt in Jasper, a report design product, and a new downloads section has been added to eHive to allow reports to generate in the background.

29 September 2011 - 3.1-3.1.2

Database, caching and indexing changes to improve the performance of the website.

13 July 2011 - 3.0

Major upgrade which includes new location history fields, new public fields, valuation history reordering, metadata for search engines and support for Internet Explorer 9.0

20 April 2011 - 2.0.1

Detail reports extended to show all private fields, not just public fields. Performance improvements to home page. Automatic emails altered to include HTML formatting. 

5 April 2011 - 2.0

New fields for object valuation history, faster create/edit screen and automatic notifications sent to account holders when comments are added to their public objects.

21 January 2011 - 1.9.3

Changes to Javascript on account and object detail pages to improve performance. 'Search Again' link added to search results page. Detail PDF report changed so that header section for an object (which includes the image) only shows on the first page for each object.

11 January 2011 - 1.9.2

Enhancement to allow for searching on words with diacritics (accented characters) with or without the diacritics. Bug fixes in label view PDF report and in saving public profile changes.

23 December 2010 - 1.9.1

Minor style changes to account public profile page to stop images overlaying text while the Javascript is loading in the background. Bug fix for occasional errors uploading images. Validation added to latitude and longitude fields on edit my profile - public profile page.

30 November 2010 - 1.9

Automatic addition of map locations for existing accounts with a public address. This enables the Google Maps changes in 1.8.9 for accounts with a physical address on their public profile page. Extensions also added to eHive API to support communities.

26 November 2010 - 1.8.9

Google maps support added allowing accounts to display a map with their physical location on their public profile page (museum directory page).

9 November 2010 - 1.8.8

Enhancement to support sorting of records in reports. Changes to beta version of eHive API.

3 November 2010 - 1.8.7

Sorting of complex object numbers. eHive now stores the original object number entered and a formatted version which is used for sorting. Draft records now sorted by date created. Bug fixes and enhancements to record indexing.

Server-side changes for upcoming eHive application programming interfaces and Wordpress plugins.

25 June 2010 - 1.8.1

A new pick list editor was added in the latest upgrade. You can edit term names and delete unused ones. Terms show the number of records they are used in, and the related records can be opened in a new tab from the link.

28 May 2010 - 1.8

Support added for rights management. A default copyright licence can be assigned to all records and overridden on any individual record. The copyright licences include All Rights Reserved (the default), Creative Commons licences, and No Rights Reserved (public domain). A new Notices area for notifying account holders of any important changes was added to the logged in home page.

18 April 2010 - 1.7

Track the acquisition of one or more objects in a single acquisition lot record. The acquisition record can later be linked to one or more object records that share the same acquisition information.

22 Mar 2010 - 1.6

Major upgrade to NZMuseums website and auto-suggestions as you type in pick list fields

11 Feb 2010 - 1.5

Image uploading section of cataloguing screens reorganised, plus the addition of a new image cropping tool

17 Dec 2009 - 1.4.2

A minor update was performed today, fixing some problems with bulk data imports and image derivative creation. We also added a social bookmarking button on key pages.

13 Nov 2009 - 1.4.1

NZMuseums search widget released

28 Oct 2009 - 1.4

New Explore page to view the most interesting objects

Behind the scenes changes for the upcoming NZMuseums widget

Bug fixes in deleting and saving records

15 Sep 2009 - 1.3

Export data to Excel and comma separated values formats

Search Friendly URLS - Convert the website address structure to a more human format (search friendly)

Improved layout and CSS - clearer more consistent layout, XHTML 1.0 compliance, simpler CSS

Community Administration Reports - Download list of approved members, Summary report (pending/approved/declined members, total objects)

Exhibition Labels (fixed format for printed labels)

Create screen - a new header section to make it easier to see the main details of an object, including the thumbnail image, on every tab.

29 April 2009 1.2

Closed beta stage completed. Now anyone can sign up for an account!

New Administrator Options for Communities - approve and decline pending members.

Link back to the Home page from your username in the top header and from the eHive logo.

My Latest Objects now includes objects that do not yet have an image.

NZMuseums - Integration with NZLive.com. Search on events information from www.nzmuseums.co.nz based on content in the NZLive.com website.

31 March 2009 1.1.1

New short aliases for common fields to save typing when searching.

Payment screens for account purchases and renewals.

12 March 2009 - 1.1

New object cataloguing screen tabs for acquisition, administration and conservation.

New fields in many of the existing create/edit screens, particularly for Natural Sciences. New icons for cataloguing screens, plus a tidier page layout.

Choose which is the main (primary) image for objects that have multiple images.

View Account Usage - this shows the usage of disk space in the account and a history of image and record counts.

30 January 2009 - 1.0.1

Minor bug fixes, new results sorting options, better compression of images