Latest Abraquest News

Latest news from Abraquest in December 2017.

We have had a busy year and have increased the number of sites installed by around 50% this year.

Currently there are two items of news:

1. We are working on a new release of Abraquest.
2. We will be stopping support of Windows XP early in the new year.

New Release of Abraquest

The next release of Abraquest will have many features that our customers have requested during the year.

This is a big release that has many new features. While Abraquest will look more or less the same as in previous releases (this is usually the case), there will be many features which we will blog about when we have finalised the features and have screen prints and help information we can put here on this blog.

New Features include:-

• A way of tagging books that allow you to make lists of books for certain purposes, e.g. for specific reading orders.
• A way of saving the format of a grid. You can alter at present but every time you enter you have to start from the default.
• Highlight pupils with overdue books in Issue/Returns.
• Modifications to Teacher Issue/Returns to accept pupil barcodes.
• The ability for a school to "borrow" a number of books off the county council and lend these to pupils.

More details to follow on this blog.

The release itself is expected early to mid January.

Stopping Support of computers running Windows XP

Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP in 2014. Windows XP does not contain the latest technology used to make calls across the internet to the cloud. Abraquest does this for example when adding books, you scan the ISBN and it checks the Abraquest cloud to save you having to enter all the details of the book.

Because we use Microsoft hosting, Microsoft have decided earlier this year not to support the version of communication that Windows XP uses. So if you use Windows XP you must manually enter book details, can't use any of the features that use the cloud, and Abraquest can't even tell you when updates are available, you have to check this blog and install them manually.

We recommend all customers using Windows XP upgrade to Windows 7 or later. We also have a few issues at some schools because we support Windows XP we can't use the absolute latest software to talk to the cloud. So at some point early 2018 Abraquest releases will no longer install on Windows XP.

It is quite probable that the release mentioned above is the last one that will run on Windows XP.

So the message is that while Abraquest will always run on the latest versions of Windows, and customers who pay Abraquest Software Assurance will always get these upgrades for free, we cannot physically support older operating systems without compromising newer users, so while we support older versions as long as we can eventually something has to give.

Any Questions?

As always, if anybody has any questions about Abraquest or any of the above, please contact us using one of your usual means.