Dear all, Welcome to the August 2007 newsletter, our regular update on developments at Third Light and news about changes and improvements made to the IMS product. This month we are announcing increased bandwidth quotas, as part of a change of location for our hosted IMS services. May we also welcome The Post Office, Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Coventry University and the NHS Transplants department, who have joined us in the past month. Welcome! (Please follow the instructions at the end of this email if you prefer not to receive our newsletters) The World Scout Jamboree http://eng.thejamboree.org/ Third Light is delighted to be supporting the Scout Association by donating an on-site media library to the World Scout Jamboree in Chelmsford. With over 40,000 Scouts and 80,000 day visitors from around the world attending for the centenary year of the Association, media interest in photographs and videos from the event is unprecedented. A donation of hardware and software to the Scouts helps the media team to manage and track the delivery of files to interested parties. Third Light IMS provides the core features of public galleries, with traceable auditing on visits and copyright controls, as well as the huge storage capacity needed to keep pace with a team of professional photographers on site. In addition to the on-site library, Third Light hosts the Scout Association's permanent media library. By following this link, you can see the latest photographs from the Jamboree including aerial photography of the site: www.tsa.thirdlight.com For more details on Third Light's project and the systems used, please download our PDF case study, here: http://www.thirdlight.com/downloads/scouts_casestudy.pdf Our best wishes to the Scout Association, and to scouts from around the world currently gathered in Chelmsford for this 100th anniversary celebration. 23 August Engineering Works On 23 August, we are moving our hosting facilities to a new data centre. This change will affect clients with subscription IMS sites, or with appliances which are hosted by Third Light in our facility. It will not affect clients with servers hosted on their own networks. Why we are moving We have grown substantially in the past few years, and as a result we need more space for servers and storage. As interest in web photo libraries increases, on average we can also see that as customers, you would like more bandwidth and storage each month. In our existing data centre, facilities have become expensive because of the escalating cost of electricity (both for the equipment and for the air conditioning to keep it cool). We think it is important to offer stable prices and good value for money, so we are moving to a new data centre which has been built with extra capacity and more space for our equipment. Benefits to you We have always run IMS on premium equipment and networks, so you won't see any change in performance. However, we're delighted to announce that we'll increase your bandwidth quota from 30GB/month to 300GB/month once the move is complete - a ten-fold increase, free of charge. In the coming months, we'll be deploying new storage arrays, and once this is done we'll also announce changes to the availability of extra quota for your site. 23 August down time We'll be using professional IT movers to help relocate our equipment during the night on 23/24 August 2007, starting at 23:00 BST (22:00 GMT). While our machines are in transit there will be no service. We expect to have the system restored by 06:00 BST (05:00 GMT) on 24 August. We will be working hard to keep the down time to an absolute minimum. We'll circulate an announcement before we start the move, and when we complete the move. If you have any questions about the engineering works on 23/24 August, please drop us an email (support@thirdlight.com). We will do our best to help. Short Event Links As you may be aware, IMS Events can be referenced directly from external web sites or emails using a link which can be picked up from the 'Manage Events' page. We have now updated the formatting on these links so that they can be made as short as possible. The link can be retrieved from the same place as before. A new short event link will look like this: http://example.thirdlight.com/a.tlx?e=8c54 The full, verbose link that has been used up to now remains fully supported. The short link system exists in parallel with the old system, and you can find further documentation on how to use event links in the Integration Notes PDF, which is available in the Help menu in your administrator account. Search Engine Update The IMS advanced search page now supports an additional clause, "Does Not Contain". This search can be used to specifically exclude unwanted keywords, and can also be used in Smart Folder rules. It is similar to the "-" modifier which can be used in the General Search form to exclude words from the results. Please click the "Search Tips" button for more details on how to use the +, - and brackets tools to improve your searches. Feedback Every feature of IMS is based on your ideas and feedback. We keep a thorough record of all feedback and aim to implement the features that are most requested as part of our development plans. Simply reply to this email to send us your comments. For support questions, please use the Help menu support tool, as this allows us to track your queries and answer questions more efficiently. With regards, Third Light Ltd. http://www.thirdlight.com/