Eileen’s Blog

My dear colleagues, I’m so encouraged by the response to my post. I’ve heard back from Keith Fiels, the Executive Director of ALA. He has passed my email call for help to others at ALA. I’m waiting to hear from them. I’ve contacted the Louisiana State Librarian, Rebecca Hamilton, and she is contacting people she knows at ALA.

A friend in Canada, Rob Zylstra, has agreed to contact the Canadian Library Association. Another friend, Don Yarman, in Ohio has passed my blog post to Laura Solomon at LJ. She has been tweeting on it, hastag #adobeisclueless.

The upshot of all of this is that I’m not alone. Libraries and librarians all over are experiencing the same frustration with the way Adobe treats us. If we can make a chink in the formidable armor of Adobe then I’ll feel my time has been well spent.

I am also considering contacting the national media. Most of their morning shows seem interested in this type of story so that is my next step. I hope I can get their support too. If any of you have any other ideas please let me know.

Those of you who know me well know I’m a pretty opinionated woman, a strong woman, a determined woman. I don’t really know how many people read this blog but I’m going to ask all of those who do to pass along the URL for other librarians to read and maybe, just maybe we can get a grassroots movement started!

Who am I taking on? Adobe. For years I’ve used their products here at the library and every time I have to purchase something or upgrade it I cringe. Why? Because Adobe refuses to consider libraries as either non-profit or academic and therefore will not give us the same discount.

I’ve personally called Adobe many times and tried to enlighten them on the errors of their ways but to no avail. I’m now faced with a price difference of over $5000 for three measly products. I’m so upset that I’ve emailed the executive director of ALA asking him for help convincing Adobe  that American libraries ARE non-profits and therefore deserving of the discount.

What I’m asking you, my colleagues, to do is to spread the word. Write to ALA. Write to Adobe. If Adobe can afford to give every K-12 and every college and university a discount it won’t bankrupt them to give the same discount to libraries.

Drop me a line at eileenk@oplib.org and let me know if you’ve passed this along. Thanks so much!

Happy Cinco de Mayo! We did the Polaris 3.6 upgrade yesterday. Surprisingly the server upgrade took longer than usual. This time we tried to do the client installs a different way and that was to push them with AD. Polaris gave us an .mst file so we thought we were in good shape. Unfortunately we could not pre-test because to do so needs the db upgrade. We forged along and did the push to most PCs the night before, leaving out the staff workstations that would be running off line circ.

This was the first time for us, actually my techs, and they made one little mistake of leaving out the name of the server to connect to. I have to admit I know next to nothing about using AD to push updates. I really need to learn but I’ve been busy doing the Polaris admin stuff and have left this part to my techs. So the upshot is we had to go back and uninstall and reinstall. We do MOST of our work remotely via VNC and that makes life good. I had three running on my screens and the guys had multiples running on theirs so we got through it relatively quickly. We will know for the next time.

I do have to say there ought to be a way to just go in and edit that one piece and I’ll talk to the guys at Polaris and suggest it as an enhancement. Having to uninstall and re-install just to tell it what server to connect to is really crazy.

So what have we found so far? Well for one, if you have have existing POs/Invoices (and who wouldn’t) you have to do a workaround to delete header charges properly. What my site manager explained to me, and much better than the What’s New doc, is that the backend link to the header charge got broken and you must remake it.

First go to the General page and remove the header charge (making note of the type) and save, then add 1 cent (or any nominal amount) as the exact same type of charge and save which remakes the link. Then remove that charge and save and all subtractions are made correctly. Sounds like a lot of work but it is really easy once you get into the swing of it. This won’t be needed with any new PO/Invoice created in 3.6.

I’ve turned on the First Avaiable Copy Hold Requests for multi-part items. We’ll see how that works today but I don’t anticipate any problems unless some of those have not been cataloged properly. As I work through the new stuff I’ll make notes and add to the blog but so far things seem to be more stable then when we did 3.5. At least I don’t see any SIP problems so far.

Keep you all posted.

This has been a good Polaris day for us. The problem with the telephony system is finally identified and hopefully fixed. It turned out to be neither a 3.5 upgrade problem nor an iTiva problem. The problem was that the training database was loaded on another server a day or so before the upgrade and things just didn’t get turned off on it. So the training database was creating notices, putting them in the ftp server, and getting imported to iTiva.

I did see two files in my report and told everyone that but none of us ever thought of the trainer. In fact I didn’t realize it had been loaded. So, it turned out to be a human error and not anything to do with the software on either system. We will test the import tomorrow and if everything seems clean I’ll plug the telephone line in and let it begin calling again - just in time for my weekend on-call!

Polaris support also figured out why our Aquisitions person can’t print POs and keeps getting kicked out of the client and locking a record. Support had found a bug in one of the .dlls and gave me a new one to load last Friday for anyone who downloads cataloging records. Well that .dll also has a bug so they are working on a fix.

The problem with my printing notices in Adobe Standard 7 is also fixed. Most Polaris clients don’t have the full version on their PCs so they chose Reader verison 8 and above for that function. They lowered it for me until I get my new version.

So all is good except for a small issue with the Daily Cash Report but I’m sure that will get fixed soon. I’m happy and now I think I can begin to enjoy the upgrades in 3.5. I haven’t even looked a the new Simply Reports!

I’ll keep you all posted when I get to that.

I’ve been in constant touch with both TalkingTech and Polaris about our telephony problem. What we are seeing is the file being made correctly on the Polaris end. I’ve been checking, they’ve been checking and the size of the file is correct at just about 100KB or less per day. I’ve opened the file and it looks fine, no dupes. However, when the file shows up on the iTiva end it has grown each day. It now stands at about 785KB and has thousands of names in it that have already been successfully called.

I haven’t a clue and they both are working hard to get us an answer so we can turn it back on with some assurance. In the meantime we are hand calling holds and I’m about to inform Unique Management not to put anyone new into collections because they haven’t been called for overdues correctly since the upgrade on the 16th. Hopefully we will get a solution before the end of this week!

Compared to this problem everything else seems singularly unimportant but we still have a few little glitches. Polaris found a bug, when downloading records a record set was not created, and immediately sent me a new .dll for the client. That actually happened the very next day after the upgrade so that is fixed. We found an error in the Daily Cash Report totals which I reported.

The Adobe problem still exists and we will do a webex session today to see if that can be corrected. We still have the problem with the self checkout units. My associate Paul is working on that one and I haven’t checked with him to see if there is a solution. Since the ticket in our support software still is open I think not. Again on this one Polaris knows and gives the patron the correct checkout date but the self checkout unit gives a wrong one on the receipt. This may be a SIP issue but I’ve been so wrapped up in the telephony problem that I haven’t even asked Paul about it.

So, many of you would probably want to know how I rank this upgrade as compared to the Horizon upgrades I’ve done. Sadly about the same. I’ve had lots worse Hz upgrades. I’ve had lots better. I had a better experience with the Polaris build upgrade but this first full version upgrade has been problematic. As for support, Polaris has been just as good as the Dynix support personnel. I’ve mentioned that Polaris didn’t consult TalkingTech about this upgrade. Well, that used to happen in Horizon as well - things weren’t fully tested.

Am I happy I migrated to Polaris now you might ask? Absolutely! I don’t have a regret we moved. Considering everything the software is better IMHO. Maybe I just won’t be the first library with all of our add-ons to upgrade the next time.

I have got to post this one quickly because I’m backlogged this week but I need to warn people upgrading to 3.5 about this problem. If you have iTiva as your telephony system and you upgrade you will have a serious problem. It seems Polaris did not consult iTiva at all before releasing this version and the file Polaris pulls replicates patrons. We have literally thousands of patrons being called for overdues and fines they don’t have - over and over again! They are furious.

I’ve reported the problem for days without anyone being able to pin it down. Finally someone at iTiva actually produced examples of the files imported from Polaris and told me they were not consulted about the upgrade at all.

So, long story short if you have iTiva don’t load 3.5 until this problem is fixed or you will be in for a world of hurt. I will post the solution as soon as we get one.

Things are pretty quite today. I got a few trouble tickets for some of the changes that I didn’t have time to go over. There are a lot of new features and some new parameters, profiles, and tables. There are some changes that need to be made in the parameters and profiles. The “What’s New..” manual has all of those listed so it’s easy to make the changes you want.

Our calling system is still experiencing some problems. We thought the new SIP would fix it but we have gotten some nasty calls from patrons irate at getting multiple reminders. Apparently apologies are not enough.

There is one thing to look out for with notice printing, and I think the technicians are trying to figure out how to get around this. I have Adobe Acrobat Standard 7.0 loaded on my PC. I have Adobe Reader 8.1 also loaded. All of my pdfs default to the Acrobat 7.0 even if I set the document to prefer Reader 8.1. We are all trying to figure that out but regardless the notices want you to have 8.0 or higher either Reader or Acrobat. Since my pdfs are defaulting to my Standard edition I can’t print the notices.

I don’t do enough in Acrobat to really make me want to pay the outrageous fee to upgrade but I also don’t want to uninstall it because we have an employment form on our web site using it. So, either we have to figure out how to tell the notices, and every other pdf for that matter, to give me a choice on opening (yes I know about right clicking and telling it to open in Reader but it still defaults to Acrobat) or I’ve got to give Adobe their overpriced fee for the upgrade. I guess I’ll give them my twice a year call telling them they should be ashamed for not giving the academic discount to libraries! I can’t even get it on Tech Soup because it told me I’m not eligible.

Really, other than the client install problems and the notice prining the upgrade has been rather tame. Nothing for me to do as an administrator on the back end. Furious work on the client install. Now, quiet and calm as staff go about their business. I’ll be reading the full manual in the next several days and if anything comes up I’ll be sure to blog.

Yesterday we did our first version upgrade of Polaris. The server upgrades, production and opac, were just fine. Since Polaris actually does that part of it my morning was pretty calm. We had decided to start loading clients early so we would come up faster, so my two staff members put the software on thumb drives and started to travel.

Well, that’s where we started to break down. The actual upgrades were completed at around noon. My guys were more than half way done with the client upgrades or so we thought. I decided I would load the client on my PC, which is running XP 64bit. I had no problems in 3.4 so I just figured I could connect to the server and grab the client, load it and get to work.

The client immediately started to give me errors. I called our site manager and she called the technician since a 64 bit upgrade is more complicated. Bob walked me through the multi-step upgrade and admitted that they intend to wrap those into a package that will do those steps in sequence without having the customer click every single .exe and create the registry entries - yes I had to create folders and string keys in the registry. Geez, I haven’t done that for years. Once I did it once the next time went faster.

Having loaded all of the pieces for the 64 bit version made us figure out that the 32 bit version also had a second piece to load - the pwcu. So the guys had to go back and load that piece to all the PCs they had already worked on. And to top it off the thumb drive’s didn’t work correctly (we were later told some of the pieces just don’t copy correctly) so we ended up having to pull the files from the server, which was the very thing we were trying to avoid in the first place since it slows everything down to a snail’s crawl.

Then we found out that several of our PCs, which have the required 256KB RAM would close out of the load because the software thought it didn’t have that much RAM. My tech took a look at our Audit Wizard software and found out that the machines THINK they have only 254KB of RAM when they have 256. We speculated that the video card may be assigned that memory. So we talked amongst ourselves and thought perhaps we could lie to the BIOS but Polaris decided to lie to the client and tell it to look for less RAM. Better solution. We finally got all of the clients loaded about mid morning today — way to long.

Here are my suggestions:

1. The long and short of the thing is that we got no instructions on how to load the client. That needs to be changed.
2. The multi-step process needs to be just a one click thing and good-grief don’t make the customers fiddle around in the registry by hand.
3. Instead of wiping the old client when loading the new one they need to let you load the new client clean and leave the old one up so you can do it way ahead of time! Those client files were on our server for a week and we couldn’t do a thing about it because it wipes out the old client. We have 8 branches and are building two more and this process is too time consuming.
4. Get a better way to deliver the client other than pulling the files from the server. More than 3 or 4 connections slow the server down to a crawl. It ended taking us more time to load clients than to do the entire server upgrades!

Tomorrow I’ll talk about some of the software small things we ran into.

Days 2 and 3 of the conference were devoted to user programs and programs for users by Polaris staff. There was a PUG business meeting after breakfast and there were some changes to the bylaws we were asked to consider for a vote at the next business meeting on Saturday. It was really informative. I plan to read the bylaws a lot more carefully. Business meetings are limited, of course, to members and it was well attended.

The Polaris staff programs were not sales pitches but programs on how to do things or how things work. This is a nice opportunity to learn from the experts - especially for a newcomer like me. I was honored to be asked to be part of a panel called Accidental IT - and this my first year at PUG conference.

PUG has three tracks at their conferences: Administrators, Workflow, and Technology. There are three time slots per day so there were 9 programs on Day 2. I had the same problem at the PUG conference that I had at my former group conference in that I really would have liked to attend all of them but had to pick one. Breakfast and Lunch were part of the conference cost and there were plenty of breaks - which means more food.

The Keynote speaker this year was Marshall Breeding. His topic was next-generation technologies for public libraries. I just loved his comment during the beginning of his presentation: “Things are really different - and I mean it!” He talked about the ILS industry being in turmoil with a very veiled comment that “takeovers have damaged the industry.” And we all know who that means!

I won’t go into a great deal of detail on his talk because it would take more time to do that than just an overview. The gist of the talk was that ILS opacs are woefully behind the industry leaders like Amazon.com and search engines. As I have been known to say, more than once and to everyone who will listen, for the first time in the history of libraries we have competition!

Mr. Breeding pointed out ILS opacs have lagged way behind and “the next generation library interfaces are delivering tomorrow, what we needed yesterday.” Even today’s college students start a search with a search engine like Google NOT with the library opac. ILS opacs need to learn from ecommerce how to build a better interface.

The only commercial opac that approaches a modern look and feel while incorporating the multi-level searching is AquaBrowser. and I’m proud to say when Mr. Breeding researched how many Polaris customers are using AquaBrowser he found only 2 and Ouachita Parish Public Library is one of them!!!!!

He had many excellent suggestions for ILS opacs and I sincerely hope the folks at Polaris are listening and taking notes. I think they are because as I said in the first post on the conference I had a long talk with the opac developer about this very thing. Perhaps ILS companies should not try to compete but partner with someone who already has the product and just brand it with some customs for their customers.

OPAC is ALL that MediaLabs does. They know how to do it and do it well. Why use your precious resources trying to copy them or Amazon, or Yahoo. Partner and make the opac what the public is used to and wants. OK, that is my soapbox not Mr. Breeding’s.

It was a good, really productive day and was topped of with one heck of a President’s reception. Good food, good music, made lots of friends, dancing, singing, Chris, Tony, Frances, Lisa, Janet, Tina, Bob - The Legend, Mary, Janus, Brad (dancing with the ILS vendors) and his wife, Denis. And the big man - Bill doing YMCA!

I’m used to attending a user conference of around 700 to 800 attendees with 10 or so tracks held in convention centers rather than hotels. I’ve been the president of our former user group - twice and planned those mega conferences. I know what goes into the cost, planning, and execution of a conference. What did I expect of the Polaris User Group 7th Annual Conference? Well certainly not as much as I got.

With the expectation that I would learn about the product, meet new contacts, and make new friends I certainly got exactly what I expected. But I got so much more! It was small but oh so useful. It was excellent in content, program, contacts, involvement, and more. I learned and had fun too. The PUG officers were welcoming and put on an exciting conference.

It started with me flying into Syracuse on Wednesday Oct. 1and meeting with several folks to discuss the RFID problems we all face. If you have not read about my frustrations see the Other Library Vendors section of the blog. I’m not alone. Everyone is equally frustrated and had RFID problems. It seems like the vendors have sold all they think they are going to sell to libraries and they don’t care one bit about anything but the revenue stream.

Several of us then went to Onondaga County Library to celebrate Banned Books Week and hear Carolyn Mackler, author of The earth, my butt, and other big round things, speak about her experience as the 4th most banned author.

Day 1 of the conference was devoted to Polaris speakers. I certainly won’t put in all of my notes but suffice it to say that the company is growing in customers and staff with 50 new contracts in 5 new states and have 13 new staff members. Bill Schickling assured everyone that they are “growing but not changing our corporate culture”. They are starting a new division within the company called Customer Relations which will report directly to Bill.

In addition to Bill, Dave Bendekovic, VP of Marketing and Sales spoke about workshops that Polaris gives on helping libraries serve their communities. Candace Zemon, Senior Product Strategist, spoke on how Polaris is moving more toward openness with standard APIs. Jim Mieczkowski, Chief Information Officer, spoke about the releases that are coming up and what we can expect from them. John Barr, Senior Product Analyst, spoke in depth on release 3.5.

There were 3 breakout sessions after the break. I chose to attend the session about the new add-on for digital media called Fusion given by my old friend Eric Graham. I’m not going to go into the details as only Polaris customers would find that interesting. Let me just say that I found Fusion an exciting product with many very nice features including a build in authenticator that can also be used for your downloadable ebooks.

There was another break and then three more breakout sessions followed by a Town Meeting with the Polaris management team. This was a free flowing discussion of anything the customers wanted to request, gripe about, suggest. It was a Q & A on steroids with lots of table to table discussion as well as table to podium. Lots of fun and lots of good information moved around the room.

We then got about 30 minutes of rest before the Vendor Reception complete with buffet and drinks. This was an intense 3 hours with the vendors since at this conference it is the only opportunity we have with them - a very different concept to me and one I didn’t know about until I saw the vendors packing up their booths at 8 p.m. So, I didn’t get to speak to everyone I wanted to speak to. A real shame. Hopefully next year they will be invited to stay longer. I did have some quiet, intense discussions amidst the chaos with some of the developers.

A great start to a great conference. More to come in my next post.