We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service. Details of the inclusions are described in the preview release notice.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.
We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes
Streamlined Issue and Return
The dialogue pop-ups in Issue Item and Return Item confirming the transaction or giving an exception have been removed. Instead, each transaction is shown in the page, below the form, with a message indicating the outcome and ordered with the most recent at the top. The transactions accumulate in the page until you navigate away. In Issue Item, after a transaction, the focus is in the Item barcode field ready for the next item to be input, so you can issue multiple items to a borrower with scan <Enter> for each one. It’s the same action in Return Item to return multiple items.
Simplified search for borrowers by postcode, email address & date of birth
You can now search for borrowers using postcode, email address and date of birth without using search qualifier prefixes. Postcodes must include the space between the two parts. A search by postcode by itself may be slow; it is likely to be quicker with another term such as name, e.g. ‘b37 7yb smith’. For Date of birth, use the form as displayed in Soprano (dd/mm/yyyy) or variations on that, e.g. d/m/yy.
Add and edit a borrower note
Click/tap the pencil icon to add or edit the borrower note, under the 
Borrower > Notes tab, and click/tap the tick to save it. The ability to add and edit borrower messages is planned for subsequent development.
Message removal interaction clarified
The control to remove a message has been changed from an X to a bin, to clarify that it removes the message from the borrower rather than just dismiss it from view.
Resource Management records searchable
Records that you have uploaded to Prism via Resource Management in the Admin Console are now included in search results.
Postcode lookup address finder
This requires integration with a postcode lookup address finder service: LLPG, QAS or Address-point. In the Soprano Create Borrower form you can 
enter a postcode and click/tap to have the address fields populated automatically. Multiple address first lines are given in a drop-down list for you to select the required one.
If you already have postcode lookup integrated in Alto, please raise a Support case to request it to be enabled in Soprano. If you do not already have a postcode lookup service, please contact Sales or your Account Manager.
Charge type names improvement
The names of charge types are displayed in the list under the Borrower Charges tab and in the Make Payment dialogue to pay an individual charge. These have been revised, with a short form displayed in the list and a longer form displayed in the Make Payment dialogue.
Furthermore, the ‘placed’ type, as it was previously called, covered miscellaneous,, notification and ILL request charges; now those three are separately identified. The new type names are defaults – local variations can be made on request.The new default type names in their short and long forms are: Fine / Fine for overdue loan; Hire fee / Fee to hire an item; Reservation / Reservation fee; Miscellaneous / Miscellaneous charge; Postage / Postal notification charge; ILL Request / Inter-library loan request fee.
If you would like to the ability to record borrower payments to be enabled in your Soprano tenancy, please open a Support request.
Invisible change to the method of bibliographic searching
The way Soprano searches bibliographic data has been radically altered to take advantage of future developments to search in Prism. There should be no noticeable change in search behaviour for Soprano users.
Harder to delete a transaction in the Offline queue
This addresses a problem where it was too easy to delete transactions in the Soprano Offline queue. The user is now invited to ‘Confirm Delete’ or to ‘Retry’.
Consistent action to edit
The pencil control is the indication that edit is possible – click/tap it to edit. This has now been included in the Item page where, currently, the Status of the item can be edited.
Unreserving items when one is in transit for the reservation: bug fix
An LMS environment variable, TAL_INTRAN_UNRES, allows you to specify that when an item is put in transit to satisfy a reservation, other reserved items for the same reservation whose home sites are not the collection site can be unreserved. A bug in the Local Data Service that deals with this has been fixed but not yet released, and deployment to all customers will take time. Meanwhile, Soprano effectively will ignore the environment variable so that no items will be unreserved when one is put in transit to satisfy the reservation. It will change again, to respect the environment variable, when the LDS update has been deployed.
Waiver treated as payment
Waivers being treated as payments is fixed in this release.
Create Borrower birth date bug fix
A problem where some dates of birth were changing in Create Borrower, in the Chrome and IE browsers, has been fixed.
Cataloguing: indicators on generated MARC field 100
Correct indicator values are now set on field 100 in the MARC record that is generated from Create Work in Soprano.
To preview this release
You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses you live data.
Release to the live service
This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Tuesday 10th March 2015.
Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.
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