Recent Updates and Future Plans

Here at Spherical it has been a busy September and October. A lot of work has gone into Abraquest in recent months behind the scenes to cloud enable it, and also as a result of customer feedback. There is a lot more scheduled in coming months as well, which as Abraquest Software Assurance customers will know, is mostly free to these customers (things that do cost are always optional extras).

There has hardly been any time to blog and tell everybody about all of this, such that our website update and blog backlog is massive! We hope to change this in coming weeks and months.

Recent changes include:

• Abraquest Automated Backup is now available, this is a backup system that backs up your Abraquest database to the cloud.
• Book search has changed; to make it clearer and more capable.
• New media and format codes have been added.
• Improvements have been made to add books to reduce the number of keypresses or mouse clicks required.
• Improvements to the Abraquest Setup Wizard to make it clearer in use.
• We have observed closely how customers actually use the product and made lots of minor improvements to simplyfy and clarify.

We would like to be more open about future plans and also invite schools feedback via the website. Upcoming features include:-

• A new reporting dashboard is in the pipeline.
• There will be additional ways of identifying pupils. Currently to issue or return books teacher is in the room and logged in, and this allows the pupil to identify themselves by name or class and name. We are considering barcodes, passwords and / or fingerprint recognition. The customer will be able to setup which ones they would like to use via system admin.
• A web based Abraquest is being considered but as this will involve over £100 + VAT hosting per year we will always offer it as an option. The main benefit of this system appears to be the ability to access Abraquest from the classroom. You may have a different opinion. If so we would love to hear from you, as we always listen and take schools opinions into account.

We will be making major updates to the website and writing blog posts about these and also upcoming features in the coming weeks.

About the author

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson has been a software developer since 1983 and has been involved with Abraquest since 2004. He is the director of Spherical Software Limited (www.sphericalsoftware.com), the company that owns Abraquest.