We’re pleased to announce that a new release of the Admin Console is now live. A new check box ‘Enable contact preferences and history’ has been added to the Overview page in Prism tenancy admin.

You will be able to use this setting when you implement Alto 5.5 and the associated upgrade to the Local Data Services (LDS).  It allows you to switch on the ‘Contact options’ tab in the My Account area of Prism. For further information please refer to the Prism release notice of 11 September 2013.

Please note, the ‘history’ aspect refers to a feature in the forthcoming release of Prism where the user will be able to see the notifications that have been sent to them by the library.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions on the Admin Console please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Prism team directly.

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video.

Agenda

• Prism Roadmap run-through
• Latest release
  • Build Search
  • Tags
• Next release
  • Take the Tour of the Library Catalogue
  • Join the Library
  • Notification options, contact details and notifications
• Admin Console
  • Borrower Notifications Rules and Templates

[podcast format=”video”]https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/clms-website/prism_webinar_100713.mp4[/podcast]

We’re pleased to announce that a new release of the Admin Console is now live. The Admin Console already allows borrower notifications to be set up and managed, and this is currently in use by those libraries who are beta testing Alto 5.5. This release of the Admin Console fixes a few issues in Notifications and organises the dashboard so that the link into your Notifications area is separate from your Prism tenancies.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions on the Admin Console please get in touch. You can comment here on the Prism blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Prism team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that a new release of the Admin Console is now live. This release enables the beta of Alto Borrower Notifications (Alto 5.5) and the admin aspects of the forthcoming tags feature that is in the next release of Prism.

When you sign in to the Admin Console and select one of your Prism tenancies you will see a change in the contents menu: the ‘User Content Moderation’ link has become two links, one to the existing Moderation area for Lists, and the other to a new Moderation area for Tags.

In the Community Features area there is a new check box ‘Enable tags’, which is unchecked by default. Checking this box will allow users to add, change and browse tags when the forthcoming version of Prism is released (you will be able to try it in the preview).

The Moderation area for Tags works in the same way as the one for Lists. There is an ‘Awaiting Moderation’ queue where tags are held for your approval when you have the Moderation Level set to ‘Pre-moderated’; an ‘Already Blocked’ list for tags you have blocked; and the Live list of approved tags (with the Post-Moderation level set, tags go straight to Live).

The next release of Prism with the Tags feature (and other features) is due to be released to preview next week – we’ll announce it here as usual.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions on the Admin Console please get in touch. You can comment here on the Prism blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Prism team directly.

We are always keen to act on feedback from our library customers and you told us that you would like more help and guidance on using the Prism Admin Console, so we have created a series of ‘how to’ videos. Each video is just a few minutes long ensuring that they can be used as a quick reference guide.

The first three videos in the series are now available:

• Changing Prism theme components
• Facebook integration
• Displaying a collection

More will be added to the playlist over the coming weeks.

I’m pleased to announce that the Admin Console refresh that we have been previewing in recent webinars has now been released into the live service.

This release is primarily to support the migration to Capita Infrastructure, ensuring a seamless transition as tenancies are migrated. While we’ve aimed for feature-parity with the previous Admin Console, we’ve also taken the time to add a few new features:

• Account settings section to change password and enable optional two-step verification for accounts
• Context-sensitive help

New account settings

The Admin Console refresh has a new “Account settings” section where you can change your password, enable two-step verification and register your email address. We will be gradually expanding this area in upcoming releases to support sub-accounts and access control lists to restrict users to certain functions.

To further increase the security of your accounts, you may now opt-in to two-step verification. This uses a mobile application to generate a 6-digit code that must be supplied when logging in. There are several apps available for smartphones, including:

• Google Authenticator for iOS, Android
• Authenticator for Windows Mobile 7/7.5/8
• Any OATH TOTP compliant application

To opt-in, go to the “Account settings” section and click on the “Change” link next for “Two step verification”:

This will open a wizard that will guide you through setting up your account, and authentication device. A backup code is also provided to allow access to your account in the event of a lost phone or device.

Context sensitive help

We’ve gone through the different sections of the Admin Console and ensured that there is explanatory text available, where required, to help guide you through some of the more complex configuration options.

In addition to this, we’re producing several introductory videos focusing on specific areas and tasks within the Admin Console. We’ll post some more information when these are available.

We welcome your comments, questions and ideas on Admin Console features. You can post comments here on the blog, discuss topics in the Prism forum, raise, discuss and vote on ideas in Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager.

This is advanced notification that Capita will be using the regular maintenance window for Prism and the associated Admin Console between 06:00 and 06:30 on Monday 25^th February through to Monday 25^th March.

Monday 25th February 2013– Network Infrastructure Maintenance (06:00 – 06:30)

Capita will be undertaking an upgrade of the network infrastructure used to provide the Prism SaaS solution. This maintenance is part of our normal programme of updates for our network infrastructure. The upgrade involves changes to a small number of network components, which may result in slight performance degradation to the service for the period 06:00 until 06:30.

The services which may be impacted during this maintenance window are: Prism and the associated Admin Console.

Since this change is to the supporting infrastructure for Prism and not the application functionality, Capita will confirm by email at the end of the maintenance window the success state of the upgrade.

Monday 4th March 2013 – Extended Network Infrastructure Maintenance (06:00 – 06:30)

Capita will be completing an upgrade of the network infrastructure used to provide the Prism SaaS solution. This maintenance is part of our normal programme of updates for our network infrastructure. The upgrade involves changes to a small number of network components, which may result in slight performance degradation to the service for the period 06:00 until 06:30.

The services which may be impacted during this maintenance window are: Prism and the associated Admin Console.

Since this change is to the supporting infrastructure for Prism and not the application functionality, Capita will confirm by email at the end of the maintenance window the success state of the upgrade.

Monday 11th / 18th / 25th March 2013 – Prism Infrastructure Upgrade (06:00 – 06:30)

Capita will be changing the software infrastructure used to provide the SaaS solutions for Prism and the associated Admin Console. These changes are in order to provide the roadmap items “Migration to Capita Infrastructure” and “Migration to new Domain Name”, which are due in 2013.

The upgrade requires that all user sessions to the applications are reset when they switch over to the new application version. In order to minimise the impact on the library users, we are therefore going to perform this outside of standard business hours, so that the number of affected users is minimised. During the upgrade Prism and the Admin Console will not be available.

The services which may be impacted during this maintenance window are: Prism and the associated Admin Console.

Capita will confirm by email at the end of the maintenance window the success state of the upgrade.

In order for Prism to reset the user’s PIN it needs to log in to your Alto system via the Local Data Services (LDS) as an operator at a particular site.

In order to configure the Reset PIN Feature you have to do four things:
1. Select an Alto login to use
2. Set that Alto login username and password within the Admin Console
3. Upload the email template that you’d like your borrowers to receive
4. Test it works.

Selecting the Alto Login to use

You can either use an existing Alto login or create a new one. Whichever you choose the login must have sufficient enablements to “View/Edit a Borrower PIN”. The actions that must be enabled are: Circulation, Borrower, Edit Borrower, and View/edit borrower PIN. These are set in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Permissions > Rules.

The actions are associated with an Enablement Profile. This is determined by a combination of Operator Profile and Site Profile, in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Permissions > Enablements Link.

An Operator login ID is linked to an Operator Profile in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Names > Operators > Operators.

A Site code is linked to a Site Profile in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Names > Location > Sites.

Adding the login to the Admin Console

Prism has a default Operator ID and Password which may work depending on your Alto configuration settings. You can specify an Operator ID and Password for Prism to use, in the Admin Console > LDS Operator area. When you have updated the LDS Operator you must reset the tenant cache for your catalogue.

Your LDS has a set of configured parameters including Site. Currently you are not able to access these; that will be provided in the Admin Console in due course. Often the Site is set to TWOC. If you are not sure which Site code your LDS is using, please open a Support case asking us to look it up for you.

You may have a policy of changing passwords regularly. This might affect your choice of Operator. Even if you would prefer to not have to remember to change the Operator Password configured for the Prism LDS regularly, it is important that you have the ability to do so, and to be able to change it at any time if, for example, the password has been compromised.

Uploading the email template

You can provide your own email text by creating and uploading a file called resetpin.txt and/or resetpin.locale.txt to your tenancy theme in the Admin Console. The resetpin.locale.txt file is for a different interface language, where locale is the locale code, for example resetpin.cy-gb.txt. In these files you can insert the following two tags:

• {{ reset_link }} – mandatory, to give the link to the PIN reset page
• {{ borrower_name }} – optional, allowing you to address the borrower by name, e.g. ‘Dear {{ borrower_name }}, …’.

Finally, testing…

Using one of your test borrower accounts within the LMS confirm it has your email address listed as the default email address. This will be used to send you the reset PIN email.

Open Prism and go to the login page, press the ‘Reset your PIN’ link and follow the instructions. You should receive an email using your provided email template allowing you to reset your library system PIN. Follow the prism.talis.com link within the email, provide your new PIN and you should see a confirmation message.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview, and that a new release of the Admin Console is now live.

List sharing

The highlight of this release is the ability to share lists. A currently popular feature with users is the ability to save items to lists for their personal use. Now, subject to library control, a user can choose to make a list discoverable by other people who use the same library catalogue. The list owner, when signed in, can also now add tags and a description to a list, and these are included in the display when the list is shared. The list owner can also change the list title.

It is now possible to re-order items on a list by moving them up or down and there is also a link to check the availability of an item, matching the one in search results.

A user can discover shared lists by selecting My Lists; within the Lists area there is now an option to view ‘Everybody’s lists’, which displays a list of shared lists in descending order of creation date. A user does not need to be signed in to do this. Selecting a tag on any list does a search retrieving those lists with that tag. A user can also select a tag in one of their own lists to view all shared lists with that tag. Selecting a list displays the items on the list as well as the list description and tags.

When viewing a list of shared lists or an individual shared list, there is an option to ‘Flag as inappropriate’; if the user is not signed in then they are invited to do so and they are then brought back to their context to complete the action. This sets an alert to library staff (more on this under the changes to the Admin Console, below) and the user sees a configurable message such as ‘Flagged as inappropriate. Thanks for letting us know.’

When a user wants to see their own saved lists but they are not yet signed in, there is now a link in the My Lists area to ‘Login to access previously saved lists’; after logging in the user is shown their lists rather than being taken to the My Account area.

Lists are not aggregated for display in other catalogues because a list may contain items that are not held in another catalogue.

Admin Console

The new version of the Admin Console, now live, has some additional features to support list sharing and to enable library staff to moderate shared content (list titles, descriptions and tags).

In the existing ‘Community Features’ area:

• there is an additional option to ‘Enable enhanced lists’. When set, this allows users make lists discoverable
• the level of moderation can be set to pre-moderated (the default, requiring approval before content is discoverable by other users), or post-moderated (library staff can still review and moderate shared content but it becomes discoverable as soon as it is shared)
• there is a setting for the number of times a piece of content (i.e. a list) can be flagged as inappropriate before it is automatically blocked (the default is ‘3’)
• you can set an email address to receive notification of additions to the moderation queue.

There is a new area, ‘Content Moderation’ where library staff can review shared content in three categories: Awaiting Moderation, Already Blocked, and Live. Staff can review the content and block or approve it. Content is listed in descending order of date created. An entry can be expanded to review the full user-contributed content and the user barcode is shown. A count is shown for the number of times an item has been flagged as inappropriate. You can click to move the item into either of the other two categories.

Other features

The format ‘Reproduction’ has been demoted in the preference order for selecting the single format to display in a results page entry. This means that those items that have both formats ‘Book’ and ‘Reproduction’ will now display as ‘Book’.

The format ‘Thesis’ now has an entry in the format precedence list so it will now display in results entries.

Next steps

We’re planning on releasing these changes to the live service within the next week. We would appreciate it if you could try these features on your tenancy as we’d love to get feedback on them and you will want to ensure that there are no problems with your local styling. The new features are switched off by default so you will need to go into the Admin Console to switch them on. It is strongly recommended that you do this in your sandbox tenancy first, so that your users do not get the features before you’re ready when we put the Prism release live.

As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy/. If you have your own host name, to see the preview you must use prism.talis.com/ instead. The preview 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.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch; you can comment here on this blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video.

Agenda

• Prism Roadmap overview
• Summary of the last Prism release, with a look at Admin Console changes, and ratings
• Next steps on the roadmap
• List sharing
• Fix to title handler for semicolon
• Development of ‘is reservable’ for context sensitive button
• Augmented discovery
• Domain name change
• Enabling the Mobile interface

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_130212.mp4[/podcast]