What features would make Ares more useful?

See the attached proposal which includes specific requests. This was submitted by Michael Cook to Atlas in March 2010.
Add print reserve statistics to their system
Utilize the open URL functionality of Ares (Tom T, please flesh this out). Involves getting a button on WCL and classic catalog Voyager OPAC. Functions as an export record from the catalog to Ares and would work similar to the way ILL requests populate the ILLIAD form. This should be explored by the GetIt! Team.
Add the ability to have multiple "Hard Copy" items types.
Call number normalization for reports, web display sorting etc. (Voyager has 2 call number fields, one is a display field and the other is a normalized field that can be sorted upon when generating reports.)

Technical details of possible Ares enhancements

NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP) functionality

Currently Voyager speaks ESIP and the first iteration of Borrow-Direct/Relais will write to that. Ideally though, BD/Relais wants to use NCIP, so plans are that it will in a subsequent iteration. To allow Voyager to speak NCIP Ex Libris is deploying a for-fee InterCirc module, which should be compatible with the Voyager version we are running (7.1.1). We haven't deployed InterCirc yet, but we will so we can be ready for BD/Relais 2. No firm plans to deploy yet, but we'll most likely do it over the summer. Saying "speak NCIP" in and of itself doesn't really say a whole lot because NCIP is a humongous standard and vendor systems typically only speak a subset of it. Nevertheless Atlas presumably deploys its stuff in a lot of Voyager sites, so their choices are basically to write to ESIP, which BD/Relais has done in the near term, or to the flavor of NCIP that Voyager InterCirc will be using. [paraphrased from an email from Marty Kurth]