As many of you already know the Alma development periodically needs to take a back seat, and maintenance, cloud infrastructure and other important tasks need to handled to ensure that Alma meets the highest standards of performance and high availability. The April 2017 Release is devoted to such tasks. Following are some general updates as well as a few sneak previews of some good things to come.

• Benchmark Analytics - We continue to gather data from our customer base in order to build robust benchmark capabilities, with a planned rollout for the April release.
• Alma UX Project – The Alma team is busy incorporating feedback from the UX workshop and preparing for the initial rollout of the new Alma UI to the early access group in Q2 2017.
• Regional Updates
  • China – We are improving and enhancing Alma’s support of CNMARC for the Chinese market.
  • German speaking countries – We are providing enhanced community-level support for RVK and GND.
  • Italy – We are in the certification process for integration with SBN.
• Data Centers – New Data Centers were recently opened in Canada and China.
• Authentication Focus Group – As part of the input from the Authentication Focus Group, we are working on new authentication options. A new feature—Sign In with Email—will be released in May. 
• Alma Digital – The May release will see the long-awaited functionality enabling end user deposits.