Prism Release Preview – 22 November 2011
I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview. This is a maintenance release addressing a number of issues:
- Disappearing lists
- Blocked borrowers get an error page when they try to sign in. In this release they will get a specific page with configurable text to say that they are blocked from signing in and to ask library staff. The longer term plan for blocked borrowers (i.e. those who have exceeded a limit on fines or overdues) is to allow them to sign in but to disallow renewal and reservation, with an alert to this in their account.
- Exporting lists as CSV sometimes has wrong data in the ISBN/ISSN column
- Mobile Prism doesn’t switch to landscape on Android HD
- Page navigation from the foot of the page to the next page displays the bottom instead of top of the next page
- The standard number (ISBN/ISSN) of an additional physical form (e.g. electronic version) recorded in MARC field 776 will now be indexed.
The purpose of the preview is to allow you to explore and become familiar with the new features before they are released to your users, and to ensure that everything is working correctly. As usual we strongly recommend that you check the preview of your catalogue carefully to make sure your styling displays as expected, including your Mobile Prism.
If you have any issues or concerns please raise a Support case. You can also comment on the release by adding a comment on this blog post or emailing me or contacting your Account Manager.
We will release this version to the live service next week. – Update: This is now scheduled for Monday 28th November.
To access the preview, insert ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/examplecat/. This enables you to search your live data and access your live Local Data Services (e.g. for availability, renewals and reservations) using the new version of Prism. You can also use it with your sandbox tenancy.
November 25th, 2011 at 11:16 am
The styling display looks the same for us this time. I’ve tested My Account logins with a few blocked borrowers and they seem to be able to log in like any other borrower. The only ones that don’t log in as normal are the ones where the record has also expired. Should borrowers with blocked messages be seeing a different page on this demo? We would actually want them to be able to access their account but not to be able to renew or reserve (as you say is planned for the future).
November 25th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
My Lists – we have noticed that when logged in to the demo version, we can see My Account data as exactly as in the live version, but different lists to those in the live version. Should we panic? Or is it a function of the “demo” version (we note that lists are not the same in sandbox as in live, either).
Otherwise it all looks good.
November 25th, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Thanks Chris and Heather for your comments. We’re checking and will let you know as soon as possible.
December 1st, 2011 at 9:32 am
There IS something odd about lists – now we have the new version live, I have two lists (with the same name), one which is the same as I had in the previous live version (if that makes sense) and one which seems to have reappeared from way back (it isn’t the same as the one I was seeing in the demo version). My list is a very simple “wants list” of things I want to borrow, so it’s fairly easy to tell when I’m seeing an old version as I’ve already read the books on it!
December 1st, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Apologies for the lack of clarity about what has happened with lists. The change in this release means that lists that had previously disappeared are now appearing again. Lists are uniquely identified by an internal ID, not by their name, so if you had re-made a list with the same name as one that had disappeared, you would now have two lists with the same name and potentially different content.
Regarding blocked borrowers, the use of that expression in the release notice was inaccurate. The case where previously the user got an error page but now gets a different version of the login page with a specific configurable message is ‘Max PIN retries’, i.e. where the user has retried to sign in with a wrong PIN to the maximum allowed number of times.
For the exception commonly known as ‘blocked borrower’, i.e. a borrower whose record in Alto has a blocking message as set by the Blocking Rules: these are allowed to sign in but cannot renew or reserve – when they try, Prism tells them that they have a message from library staff on their ticket and to contact the library for more information. I believe this is essentially as required (as confirmed by Chris’ comment). The next upgrade to LDS will allow Prism to be further modified to display a notice to the user in their account area about being ‘blocked’ and what the implications are.
December 1st, 2011 at 3:11 pm
OK thanks, Terry.