I know you are all wondering if we fell off the edge of the earth. I haven’t blogged for quite a while but I’ve been extremely busy, as any of you who have done a major migration can imagine. The go-live is complete and we are now working in Polaris. I know you all want the details so I’ll try to go back in time and recreate some of what went on during the last two weeks.
The production db was loaded 5 days before go-live and the race was on! Any changes not mirrored in it from work done on the trainer db were lost. All staff groups and permissions were lost. I tried to get to the staff permissions early on but that was just not possible with all of the other things we were doing.
Polaris decided to send two, yes two, staff members down for our go-live and they arrived at different times on Monday, June 2nd. The most valuable of them was the network expert, Mark Harrington, because we have so many third party products hooked into the ILS. You might ask why we waited until a day before go-live to do that? I didn’t. I had been asking about them for 6 months.
Actually we had a strategy meeting on the third party solutions about two weeks prior to go-live for that very reason. I saw no progress though I had been asking. The folks at Polaris, including the CEO, gathered for a conference call and we hammered out exactly who needed to do what, when. They created a chart and including responsibilities. With chart in hand, we started to progress.
So, back to Monday, June 2nd and Mark Harrington and third parties. First he did some one-on-one with my Associate, Paul Havard about Active Directory and our DNS settings. Paul is the one of the three of us that has the greatest understanding of AD so I leave him alone with that. With the settings tweaked we started calling the third party vendors and getting them to start. I had contacted all of them months ago to let them know of the migration and they were ready and waiting.
AquaBrowser was the first to jump on the configuration bandwagon and do some hard work. Getting all of their settings to hook into the new OPAC did take quite a bit of work but Polaris and AquaBrowser worked together with me just doing the testing. Terry Parks of AquaBrowser actually stayed in her office the night before go-live to work. We all (my staff and the Polaris people) stayed until about 11 p.m. Central Time. By then we were exhausted.
Polaris configured their WAM wireless product to authenticate and we had to change the settings in Blue Socket. At this time patrons are able to get in but we have to do more work fine tuning because WAM uses RADIUS and it does not pull any preferences from Polaris. I’ll have to work directly with NLE, our Blue Socket vendor, with that but patrons are able to get on so we’ve put this on a back burner for now.
Of interest to any SirsiDynix customer who might be reading this, Digital Library will not integrate into the Polaris OPAC. Polaris just developed their own digital product. I’m not too concerned about this because we are integrating Archival Ware, the original name of the product from PTFS, into AquaBrowser.
The nice new-item newsletter Wowbrary was back up within days. What a wonderful product and what a wonderful bunch of guys who run this. They were completely on top of the project and got it running almost immediately when the OPAC was available to the world. If you don’t use Wowbrary to deliver new item information to your patrons you should look into it.
RFID integration has been quite a task. Getting an understanding of how Polaris SIP works was interesting. It is quite different from ESIP, used by SirsiDynix. In Polaris one instance of the SIP service runs with port assignments to each product or connection. In ESIP we had many unique services running, one for each connection. A little difference of philosophy but it was kind of amusing how hard it was getting someone to explain an easy concept to us.
The setup of SIP by Polaris was quite easy and fast; getting the RFID tangle working has been the challange. We have Checkpoint with the central server here at Main and a Youniquely4U server here also. At checkout we don’t just connect to the simple RFID; the category (based on Y4U parameters and an output of items from our system) of each item is trapped and Y4U sends back the appropriate information for that service to be printed on the receipt. Quite involved and we are still having a problem with the self-checkout units not printing a receipt. We also had to change our procedure for printing receipts at the front desk.
The biggest problem is with Checkpoint/3M support. Several months ago Checkpoint contracted with 3M to support their library division products but retained Y4U. So since our problem seems to involve both we send a request but don’t always know which company will help us. Every so often I have to “shake the tree” to get a response. Polaris has also tried very hard to get things working but can’t work on this alone. So, we are presently in a holding pattern. I may take down Y4U altogether if we can’t get a resolution soon. We can always put it back up when we get some attention.
We decided to keep our telephony system iTiva from TalkingTech since it is a cross-platform product and will work with any ILS. Polaris has their own telephony system but has worked very diligently with TalkingTech to make iTiva successful. Again we have two great vendors working together to make the transition as smooth as possible. We had support across three continents working and that has been really interesting since Polaris and OPPL are in the U.S. talking to support in England and New Zealand. They do have a Chicago office but the lead support has been in New Zealand on this project. We have one little issue with a dropped SIP connection but I’m sure that will get taken care of very soon.
Content Cafe was a piece of cake, since Polaris worked directly with Baker & Taylor and we didn’t have to do a thing. We also have MyLibraryBookstore to integrate. We’ve waited on that because we had a contract with SirsiDynix that is not up until December. They graciously released us from it so we can integrate it in the OPACs.
The last and maybe most important at this point is authentication. I’ve asked for months about this and been told that Polaris has an authenticator included. But it seems our wires got crossed because when we got down to the nitty-gritty it won’t authenticate those remote products like NetLibrary, and our databases that require a referring URL. We purchased EZProxy. When we get that complete (it is partially up at the moment) they will come in and change our 856 tags to the proper URL.
I have to say Polaris stepped up made many accommodations for us. They acknowledged they dropped the ball on some of our stuff. I believe they really had no idea of the complexity of our systems here. We had been talking a long time about them but Polaris just didn’t quite understand what they would be facing with a long time Dynix customer who had purchase so many of their add-ons.
I’ve been told we were one of the most complex migrations from SirsiDynix they have done. I believe it! I think we all learned a great deal from it. Polaris plans to send Brad Rogers down here for a debriefing soon. My plan is to help others coming behind me have a smoother transition. Polaris wants the same thing and we plan to work together on this.
Through all of this the OPPL adminstration, the staff, Polaris, all of the vendors, my staff and I have actually kept our sense of humor. Under stressful situations I kept telling everyone we don’t do brain surgery here. A day or two’s inconvenience is not going to hurt anyone, physically. We all try to smile and be positive. I think my perspective has changed since I have a son-in-law in the military who is deployed for the second time and IS putting himself in harm’s way to serve our country.
With that very real assessment of our migration in the scheme of things, I’ll end this post.