We’re pleased to announce that as part of our ongoing maintenance of our SaaS SSL stack, we have been reviewing the encryption protocols we currently support for our end-user facing web solutions which include Soprano, Admin Console and Partner connections using HTTPS.

In order to comply with industry best practice and encryption standards, we are removing support of a protocol called TLS1.0 from our application stack.

For anyone using a relatively recent web browser, such as Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, Chrome or Safari, you will already be using a more recent and more secure TLS protocol and will be unaffected by this change.

For older browser versions which do not support higher versions than TLS1.0, industry best practice recommends that you upgrade your browsers to latest supported versions available from your vendor. Our analytics data shows there are only a small number of connections from old vendor unsupported web browsers.

To preview this change

You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses your live data.

Release to the live service

This change will be released to the live service on Monday 10th September, 2018.

Comments and contact

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog and in the Soprano Forum or contact support or sales admin teams directly.  To suggest and discuss additional features please visit the Soprano Ideas Forum.

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 here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

Soprano has developed a lot over this past year, with many new features and functional areas being added to the application. We’ve been very successful in adding these new features in without impacting the existing Alto application (the one on your desktop). We have done this through releasing new content in the Local Data Services (LDS) in a manner which does not break existing applications.

Each new Soprano feature is typically dependent upon features released in preceding LDS versions, so many of the new Soprano features can simple be enabled where LDS is already up-to-date. The following table shows the LMS/LDS version dependency and the related Soprano features.

Capita have pledged to support the current and previous versions of our applications, and have done this to help encourage all our customers to receive all the latest software fixes, patches and new features, and also ensure application development is efficient through deprecation of old code that is no longer required.

One new feature within Soprano that is being developed at the moment is the ability to see and override exceptional circumstances while issuing, renewing or returning library stock. At present, all customer’s versions (known as tenancies) are configured with a default set of overrides, and if the operator has permission to apply these overrides, they are automatically applied. This is changing, so that the operator is asked to approve any override, giving visibility of the overrides being applied and assisting the librarian’s choice of whether applying the override is the right thing to do.

The complexity of this change means it is time to remove support for LDS 1.x – that’s any version of LDS 1 – from the issue, renew and return features of Soprano.

If you are using Soprano and have LMS version 5.7 or LMS version 5.8, you will be unaffected by this change and do not need to take any action. Soprano will continue to support LDS versions appropriate for the supported LMS releases.

If you are running LMS version 5.6.1 or older, you will need to upgrade to at least LMS 5.7 in order to retain the functionality in Soprano to issue, renew and return library stock.

If you are unsure which version of the LMS you are running, this can be seen at the top of the Alto application, as shown here:

We intend to release the version of Soprano which no longer supports LDS 1.x near the beginning of September 2016. Please ensure that you are running a minimum of LMS 5.7 and LDS 2.0 before September 2016. If you have any questions, please raise a support case through the support portal or contact your account manager.

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview since 11th December 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 more new Soprano features have been released to the live service. The features are described in the Soprano Release Preview notices for 15th November.

We are pleased to announce the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release contains the functionality required to make use of the new “Two Factor Authentication” security feature.

Two-Factor Authentication

This optional feature increases the security features available to you for controlling access to Soprano by adding a verification step to the login process, much like some banks use on their web sites.

Two-Factor Authentication is an implementation of the OATH-TOTP standard, which is supported by many hardware tokens, and also a number of software solutions, such as the free Google Authenticator application available on all mobile platforms.

When Two-Factor Authentication is required for an operator, the logon process changes to prompt them for a one time numerical code after they have provided their username and password. This verification code is generated by your choice of OATH-TOTP token generator, and changes every 30 seconds. This ensures that anyone not in possession of the correct token generator will not be able to access Soprano.

In order to activate this feature, your administrator should use the Admin Console released earlier this week to configure the individual OATH-TOTP tokens for each operator. Please ensure that you perform a reset of the Soprano cache in the demo environment in order to allow Soprano to pick up your Two-Factor Authentication changes. In order to perform a reset of the cache, simply add “resetcache” to the end of your Soprano URL, such as https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}/resetcache.

To preview this release
To preview this release, please insert ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after ‘soprano’, so that the URL is like this:  https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}.

This is an opportunity to see how the new features fit your local context and to check that everything else is working correctly. Please remember that it is using your live data.

Release to the live service
This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Monday 25^th November 2013.

Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment on this blog post, contact your Account Manager or contact me. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.