Eileen’s Blog

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.

It’s been a long time since the last blog which could mean things are really good or really bad. I’m happy to report that ILS and migration wise things are really good. Everyone is delighted with Polaris. We have had a few small issues but nothing to cause any great problems. I’m so impressed with the vendor’s willingness to make changes, fix problems, and partner with our third parties to make things happen.

For example, the last item on our migration table was our wireless system through NLE. It is a BlueSocket system that parcels out resources based on authentication and patron code. In the great bustle of things going on during migration it kind of got put at the back of the heap since we had more important issues and wireless could still be accessed through the guest account. However I really wanted to use the authentication system again to assign resources. Polaris at first didn’t think it could be done since their WAM uses a RADIUS connection which does not authenticate from the patron database.

I long time friend of mine recently joined the NLE staff. His name is Stacy Betts. He gave me a call to tell me he recently joined NLE and ask if we needed anything. They were interested in forming a relationship with Polaris. Well I mentioned that we needed to see if we could get a SIP2 query to return the patron code in Polaris for authentication in the BlueSocket device. I knew Envisionware was doing it for their self-checkout units.

I contacted Polaris and asked if they would discuss the issue with NLE. They readily agreed. I volunteered to alpha and beta the solution. Within a couple of weeks they were in discussions and they had a test running in the NLE lab. I won’t go into the technical details suffice it to say that it was a bit more complicated than our old system. The tech departments of NLE and Polaris had the solution ready for me to implement this week and we put it on line.

I’ve got to say that Polaris, without the usual “what’s in it for me” you often get from vendors, jumped in and cooperated above and beyond the call of duty to make this happen. They spent the staff time to come up with a solution and to work with an unknown third party vendor, NLE. I think we found the right system and the right ILS company for OPPL.

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.

We just finished 2 grueling weeks of on-site training. Week 1 was a train-the-trainers for Circulation and PAC and Cataloging. Week 2 was Acquisitions, Serials and SA. The sessions ran from 9 a.m. to after 4. Week two typically started earlier and ended later. We had two very excellent trainers Debbie Pharr and David Needham, but I have to say David really put me through my paces in SA training. David touched every item that an SA has to deal with systematically and I’m sure my notes, while extensive, don’t do the class justice.

We are now trying to digest everything and remember where stuff was! I’ve got lots of setup to do and while my changes won’t “stick” to the production db our site manager, Ann Lorish, will shadow my changes onto it so I won’t have to do it all over and try to remember what I set up.

I’m still not entirely happy with the way the migration was modeled but I do have to say that Polaris is most interested in my evaluation of the process. So much so that they are sending someone down for a “debriefing” session. I’ll share my observations and hopefully they will make some changes to the process for those following. This will be most important to those Horizon libraries that are moving to Polaris, but I think all migrating libraries will have similar concerns.

We are still trying to catch up our Active Directory network, something we should have done years ago. Sure we talked about it endlessly but never did anything because our NT network was running just fine. I’m ashamed to say I let this one linger on well past its life because there were other things going on. I’m the one around here that promotes change and I let it slide. Well, OK, lesson learned! We’ll really have to keep on top of Windows updates now since it is so crucial to Polaris.

I’ve had several calls lately from colleagues who are interested in how I feel about Polaris. The answer is really good; I feel really good. There is a consistency to Polaris that makes it intuitive. All screens are similar. You find the same elements on all screens, page icons to the left, functionality icons along the top. The “Find Tool” looks the same and works the same in all areas, Circ., Cat., Acq., etc., with the only change in the drop down selections. There are lots of shortcut keys, for those who don’t like to mouse.

We actually began staff training yesterday and the trainers are telling me so far everyone is excited about the change and just love the screens. You can see so much more information on them by just clicking an icon. The trainers told me that the staff is actually oohing an aahing out loud as they are shown things. We had that same reaction during the big all staff demo back in December. This tells me there is more “buy-in” than we ever had in Horizon, not that I think Hz is a bad system. Had SirsiDynix not killed it we would have moved to Hz 8.0 without knowing the alternatives.

So change IS a good thing. I really think every library should periodically invite vendors in to demo their products. We were customers of Dynix/epixtech/Dynix/SirsiDynix since 1988. As systems administrator I never entertained the possibility of leaving. I never really looked at the competition. We moved from Dynix classic to Horizon and paid as if it was a migration to another vendor. The same would have been true if they hadn’t killed Hz 8.0 and Vista Equity Partners not taken such a hard hand in running the company. I’ve learned from this experience that loyalty to a company is fine but keep your options open and look around. Something just might be better!