We’ve developed some new features and fixed some issues that improve aspects of loans, reservations and availability for your Prism users. To activate these, Prism requires an upgrade to your local data services, which is now available on request.

Key features

Renew a loan when reserved by another borrower

This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Option to allow renewal of reserved items’. It will take account of your LMS configuration setting for Res-Renew Due Date in your Loan Rules.

Reserve items that are not In Stock

This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Allowing borrowers to reserve items on order’.

Currently users can only reserve items whose status is In Stock. With this new feature you can specify other statuses that you would like to be reservable, such as items that are on order or received. Non-In stock items are not included in the reservation but the reservation is set against the work; when items change to In Stock status they will be included in the reservation automatically by a process in Alto (5.4 or higher) so that they can be used to satisfy the reservation.

Required item statuses are specified using their numeric IDs. Typically perhaps you might specify 2 (Order sent) and 3 (Received). These are set in a new parameter in your local data services, which we will update for you on request.

To keep up to date with the latest Prism Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 10^th June 2013 at 12:00 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries.

In this webinar we’ll discuss the latest Prism developments and review the Prism Roadmap, as well as giving you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism news and information on the Prism website, here on the Prism blog and on the Prism Forum.

Following on from our post on the 8th May I thought it would be useful to give an update on the Platform Migration project.

We are now more than half way through the migration with 54 customers using the Capita Platform. We continue to be on schedule to migrate all of our customers across by the end of July.

If you are keen to be moved over the next month please let us know by raising a support case or emailing the team libraries-support@capita.co.uk and we will be in contact soon.

Benefits of the new platform have now been posted to the Prism Forum and can be accessed here

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please contact us at libraries-support@capita.co.uk.

Over the past few weeks we have been working with a number of Prism customers to move their Prism bibliographic data from the Talis Platform onto the Capita Platform.

After a successful beta program with four customers we have now started to move across our remaining customers and to date 19 customers are now live on the Capita Platform including all of our Assist Managed Service customers.

For those of you who are yet to be migrated we thought it would be useful to outline the process so that you are fully aware of what is involved.

The migration is of the data only to the new platform and is not directly linked to the domain name transition, further details of which can be found here.

The platform migration involves a re-grab of the data from your catalogue. To minimise impact to your live service, we have redefined the process in recent weeks so that we only stop the delta updates for a couple of hours whilst the re-grab is performed. Once complete the deltas will be switched back on and any backlog will be cleared automatically.

Once the data has been re-grabbed it will be converted and loaded into your Sandbox environment and made available to you for testing. Once the testing has been completed the live tenancy will be pointed at this new data and a catch up delta grab will take place to ensure this data is fully up to date. This usually takes no longer than one hour.

On the migration process Tracey Temple from Northumbria University commented:

“The migration was smooth and painless, searching is quicker, as well as the wonderfully improved facet results, building from the whole result set is a major improvement, and it is handy being able to see the facet counts.”

John Daniel from Leeds Library and Information Services added:

“The new platform does seem faster returning results and seems to handle returning larger numbers of results better than before….. We also really like the Facet counts showing against each individual facet from a result set. The migration itself was a very smooth process with no down time that we noticed.”

We are currently scheduling the migration over to the new Capita platform and are on track to have all customers fully migrated by the end of July. If you are keen to be moved over the next month please let us know by raising a support case or emailing the team libraries-support@capita.co.uk and we will be in contact soon.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please contact us at libraries-support@capita.co.uk.

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

• Roadmap review
• Latest release
• Migration to the new platform
• Next release inclusions
• Features coming soon

[podcast format=”video”]http://clms-website.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_220413.mp4[/podcast]

I’m pleased to announce that your Prism tenancies are now accessible on the new domain name: capitadiscovery.co.uk/tenancyname, in addition to prism.talis.com/tenancyname.

Why a new domain name?

Following the acquisition of Talis by Capita in 2011 and further to recent communications, the Prism domain name is changing to capitadiscovery.co.uk.  We plan to run the two domain names in parallel over the next eight months to allow plenty of time to complete the changes described below.

If you have your own domain name for Prism, that name will not change and there is no impact on it.

Going forward, to preview new releases of Prism please use the URL: demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk/tenancyname.  This will be reiterated when the release preview is announced.

Transition Plan

The two domain names will run in parallel over the next eight months.

In May, with the next release of Prism the old domain name will become a silent redirect to the new capitadiscovery.co.uk domain.

In July, the release of Prism will contain a ‘noisy’ redirect – a page will be displayed for a few seconds telling the user they are being redirected and that they should update their bookmarks and any other saved links and rss feeds, and then it will automatically redirect to the new URL.

The redirect will become progressively noisier throughout the year to encourage users to update their bookmarks.

We recommend that you fully complete your switch over to the new domain before the end of December 2013, in order to ensure that you are not impacted when the prism.talis.com domain is no longer available.

What do you need to do?

You should begin now to change any places where the old domain name is used, replacing it with capitadiscovery.co.uk. You should also prepare your communication with your library users about the change.

Starting now, you should identify any places where your library provides links into Prism, and change the domain name in the link URL from prism.talis.com to capitadiscovery.co.uk. When you add a new Prism link anywhere from now on you should use the new domain name capitadiscovery.co.uk.

The places where you may have links that need to change include:

• Prism home page, footer, and other pages
• Library website pages, including subject resource lists
• Reading list system
• Student portal
• Virtual Learning Environment
• RSS feed readers
• Facebook
• Blogs
• Video sites such as Youtube
• Applications built using the Prism Linked Data API

Types of links that need to be changed include:

• The Prism search box widget
• Links to the catalogue and the login page
• Prepared searches
• Links to specific items
• RSS feed reads

Changing your links now will mean that they will not be affected by the redirects or the eventual withdrawal of the old domain name.

You should also check your Prism extensions to ensure they work on both old and new URLs. Google Maps will need a new key to work on your new Prism URL. To enable Google Maps to work on both old and new URLs you will need a modification to the Prism extension to detect the URL and use the appropriate key. See the Google documentation on Obtaining an API Key.

Other extensions that use third party services may have similar issues. If you would like assistance in modifying extensions to work with the new domain name, or if you use  ‘In-Page Analytics’ in Google Analytics, please open a support case.

On your OPAC terminals in the library if external access is restricted then you may find that the new domain is blocked, so you may need to get changes made to allow the new domain.

 
If you have any questions or issues about the Prism domain name transition, please contact your account manager or open a support case.

To keep up to date with the latest Prism Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 22^nd April 2013 at 12:00 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries.

In this webinar we’ll discuss the latest Prism developments and review the Prism Roadmap, as well as giving you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism news and information on the Prism website and here on the Prism blog.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that the preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service. As described in the preview release notice, this is an infrastructure release with changes to the Prism infrastructure in order to support the delivery of the roadmap items ‘Migration to the Capita Infrastructure’ and ‘Migration to a new domain name’, which are due during 2013.

We welcome your comments, questions and ideas on Prism 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 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
• Recent releases
• Prism performance
• New Admin Console
• Forthcoming release
• Migration to Capita Infrastructure

[podcast format=”video”]http://clms-website.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_060313.mp4[/podcast]