De retour de Montreal – Back from Montreal – News in Brief
FastTrack hosted several meetings at the occasion of the 20th CIS Sessions in Montreal (September 24th to September 28th) where some improvements to the meeting schedules and organization have been taken into consideration.
The extended CIS-Net Business, Technical Liaisons and observers from CISAC societies met on Monday with one-day CIS-Net Business Liaisons and CIS-Net Technical Liaisons parallel meetings to discuss hot topics and to move forward with the ongoing projects.
Business Liaisons focused on the following topics:
1/ Discussions and approval of the Business Requirements presented on Phase 1 of the user interface enhancements by the SACEM Project Team Manager, Frédéric Rampelberg. The requirements were approved by Business Liaisons and forwarded to approval of the CIS-Net Steering Committee and CISAC CSB/FastTrack Management Board. The next step will be to draft Functional and Technical Specifications and to start development in order to have the new improved interface integrated in the next major release of CIS-Net. The major features of the new interface will be:
- Harmonized back button;
- Improvements in works details results page through the use of a magnifying glass symbol;
- Google-like search facility added to the current search facility;
- Alpha-numeric navigation;
- Ability to display results according to user profile.
2/ Presentation of the next steps to move forward with Phase 2 of the Documentation Clean-up and Integrity (DCI) project: the first assessment has been processed and analyzed by the DCI Business Group. The next step will be to define test cases and data for the regression tests.
3/ Business Requirements of the Live Performances Notifications were presented by BMI’s co-Project Manager Alice Meisel. They were approved and were also submitted to CIS-Net Steering Committee and CISAC CSB/FastTrack Management Board approval process. An additional breakout session was also held in Montreal focusing on the definition of business rules to submit set lists among societies. Such business rules will be drafted by the Project Team within the coming months and added to the Business Requirements. Functional Specifications should be available for further approval by the end of 2012.
4/ Consolidated Business Rules have been subject to a yearly review, especially Business Rules on MWI mandatory/optional works information, on US representation and on the definition of ‘Authoritative works information’.
5/ The business uses of the Push functionality will be further analyzed by a dedicated taskforce (BMI, PRS for music, SOCAN and FastTrack Management representatives), who will report in Lisbon at the occasion of the next CIS sessions.
Technical Liaisons on their side mainly focused their meeting on projects status reports, such as:
- Technical status of closing, currently developed and future projects;
- Recommendations following the technical gap analysis study with the review of the various items in the action list, the regression tests and the update on recent technical incidents;
- Follow-up on Deployment of CIS-Net Version 4.4 (Beta) and future delivery;
- Report on ongoing security audit driven by SGAE;
- Discussion pertaining to development and supporting tools such as the end of support for Java 6 and the automation of functional testing.
Both groups jointly met on Wednesday for 90 minute open session to address and solve questions raised by CIS-Net Business and Technical Liaisons in their Monday meetings, to share the conclusions of the two meetings with the community of CISAC observers and to forward the following recommendations and issues to the CIS-Net Steering Committee to be held on Thursday morning:
- Documentation Clean-up and Integrity, Phase 2: in the framework of the FastTrack Project Process appropriate involvement of the Business and Technical Liaisons is requested at the various steps of the project. The same applies to approval process by CIS-Net Steering Committee and CISAC CSB/FastTrack Management Board.
- Major release 4.5 of CIS-Net including the final version of the re-engineered AVIndex, Translated Titles for AVI and User Interface Enhancements will be subject to an inventory review and decisions by CIS-Net Steering Committee, who will make a final decision on the various options to be included in this release.
- Key Performance Indicators will be further studied and analyzed within the coming months.
The kick-off of the new pro-active and informal format of the former FastTrack Forum took place at noon, just after the joint meeting. The participants had the opportunity to meet and actively question four Workshop experts on the following priority topics:
- Use of FastTools, the FastTrack Support and Documentation tool (FastTrack Didier Roy & Annick Duflos)
- ISWC, CSI and UP Matching tool (SOCAN Terry Boissonneault & Richard Ali)
- AVI re-engineering (BMI Sylvain Masson, ASCAP Mary O’Connell)
- WID and International Repertoire Node (ASCAP Tom McManus & Julio Virella)
Although the participants were surprised by this new organization the workshops encountered a great success. FastTrack and CISAC will jointly work on ways to improve the format and to propose topics in advance to make sure participants will have time to raise appropriate questions and issues to the workshops experts.
FastTrack also organized its Management Board meeting to discuss the FastTrack Financial topics, mainly 2013 operational and projects budget presented by GEMA’s Heinz Winkelmann, Chair of the FastTrack Financial Committee. Projects budget will be reviewed after the Montreal meetings in light of decisions taken on projects (Enhancements to User Inteface Phase 1, Multi-Territory Multi-Right Phase 0 and Phase 1), next release delivery and new developments on the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) project. Once reviewed by FastTrack Financial Committee, it will re-submitted to the usual approval management process before final approval by FastTrack and CISAC Boards early December 2012.
All slides and reporting related to FastTrack meetings held at the Montreal sessions are available to all CIS-Net Business and Technical Liaisons in the the FastTools (http://fasttools.fasttrackdcn.net) Repository.
We will do our best to make the next meetings in Lisbon as successful and friendly as those held in Montreal! Looking forward to seeing you all in Lisbon!
Annick Duflos, Information & Communication Director
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