OMERO Beta4 Release

The OME Consortium http://www.openmicroscopy.org is proud to announce the release of OMERO Beta4.0. This release is the product of a huge effort from our development team, and marks substantial changes in OMERO's infrastructure and significant steps in functionality. Much of the functionality we are releasing has been developed in direct response to feedback from users, either through these lists, or at our annula OME Users Meeting at Institut Pasteur in Paris.

In the past we have used our Trac sites as user resources. Many of you will know these sites from accessing our MilestoneDownloads pages. In response to many requests, we've moved our main portals for documentation and downloads to the main project site, http://www.openmicroscopy.org. The pages here will continue to develop and mature over the next few weeks. However, the site is mature enough to serve as a complete Beta4 reference. The starting point for OMERO is:

http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero4/server

You'll find docs, definitions, and of course downloads.

As always, any feedback on mistakes, requests, or comments is much appreciated.

What's new in Beta4?

Better to ask, what isn't! Briefly:

• OMERO.server: remove JBOSS, and switch all remoting to ICE. Improve session management, supporting creation of many thousands of session. Addition of an import service, for server-side importing. DB upgrades to support the metadata completion facilities. Substantial improvement to interaction between indexing engine and rest of server. Please Note: For those of you running OMERO.server on Windows, the Blitz server runs according to the instructions on http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero4/server/install-windows. However, OMERO.web is not supported yet under Windows. We will fix that imminently.

• OMERO.importer: Migration to Blitz interface, giving much faster performance. More efficient importing, complete metadata support for Zeiss LSM510, Leica LIF, Zeiss ZVI, Applied Precision DV, and MetaMorph STK. Add command line importer for batch import.

• OMERO.insight: Migration to Blitz interface, giving much faster performance. Updates to metadata display, include complete support for OME Data Model. Much expanded integration of protocol management via OMERO.editor, within OMERO.insight. Support for image delete. Refinement of Projection Interface.

• OMERO.web: all new browser-based client for OMERO. Enables sharing of images with colleagues (must have account on server)

• OMERO.editor: a management tool for experimental protocols, now fully integrated with OMERO.insight, so that protocols and experimental descriptions can be saved along with images and datasets. Includes a new parameters function, so that protocols in traditional documents can be easily imported into OMERO. Supports, tables and .xls files. Also runs as a standalone application.

• OMERO.fs: a new OMERO client, that monitors a specific directory and enables automatic imports. In its first incarnation, has quite limited functionality, supporting automatic import of LSM510 files only. More coming soon!

As always, if you want the gory details, see

http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/omero/milestone/OMERO-Beta4

http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/shoola/milestone/OMERO-Beta4

Docs & Videos

We've been pretty busy getting Beta4 ready and documented, so we haven;t yet updated the videos at http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/videos. New videos will appear over the next few weeks (they are really alot of work!). Also, many of docs on our Trac sites are being deprecated. In general, use http://www.openmicroscopy.org as a pointer for up-to-date docs.

Permissions

Please note that in Beta4, all data in an OMERO server is now private-- in response to many requests. Thus, all your images and tags are visible only by you. You can share images with other users with the Share mechanism in OMERO.web. This is in preparation for allowing users to change their own permissions in later releases.

Please let us know if you have any problems or comments. As always, using the "Send a Comment" facility logs your suggestions with OME developers, and is an important source of information for us.

Thanks again for your support and interest.