We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• Circulation exception handling
• Borrower On Loan adjustments
• Sorting borrower loan history
• Re-use new borrower details as a template
• Analysis and Interest in Create Borrower
• Borrower type in borrower search results
• Borrower expiry imminent – alert
• Delete a borrower
• Renewing loans – new features
• Printing Reservation and Transit slips
• Mark items as seen – exception alerts
• Item statuses in drop down lists
• Pick items for stock rotation
• Reservations Pick List richer bib data
• Offline developments
• Circulation fixes
• Local Data Services (LDS) requirements

Circulation exception handling

Many kinds of exception can occur in Issue, Renew and Return. The home site of a returned item may be elsewhere, or the item may be reserved for collection at the current site or at some other site. There may be a hire charge associated with an item being issued. A borrower wishing to renew a loan may be blocked due to excessive fines, or have reached their unseen renewal limit.

This release of Soprano handles a wide range of circulation exceptions, taking account of the operator’s enablements and environment variables to determine behaviour, and giving appropriate notices and options.

Soprano treats an exception as either Ignorable, Notifiable, Confirmable or Terminal. These categories determine the information and other content given in the transaction outcome row.

An exception is ignored when it:

• Is not relevant to the transaction, such as in Issue or Renew when the item’s home site is not the current site
• Can be dealt with silently, such as in Issue when the item is reserved by the borrower and the reservation can be automatically updated to Collected status
• Concerns the borrower and is indicated as an alert on the borrower as displayed at the top of the Issue/Renew/Return page.

Notifiable exceptions do not warrant an interruption to the transaction but there is value in displaying an alert in the outcome row. This is often the case in Return Items, where there is usually no need to hold up the return transaction. An example in Return Items is when the item’s home site is elsewhere. In Return and Renew when a fine is incurred the amount is displayed. In Issue or Renew when the borrower’s account expires before the loan due date, the alert text varies depending on whether the due date has been reduced to the expiry date according to the TAL_AUTOCHOP environment variable setting.

Confirmable exceptions interrupt the transaction and require confirmation to be completed. They allow the operator to decide whether or not to go ahead, perhaps in some cases after consulting the borrower. They are usually exceptions where the operator has an override enablement. Examples in Issue and Renew include where the borrower is blocked or has reached a limit, or a charge will be incurred.

In Return there is less reason to interrupt the transaction, but it occurs when the item has a message, which may be about checking that everything is present and correct.

An exception is terminal when it cannot be overridden by any operator. Some cases in Issue and Renew are where no due date can be found because there is no loan rule or because the rule disallows issue or renewal, perhaps because the item is reserved or because of the item type and/or borrower type. In these cases the operator may be able to try again with a manual due date.  Other examples include where the item is reserved awaiting collection by another borrower; the item is already on loan; and, the borrower’s account is expired or deleted.

In this example the notice that the ‘Item is reserved – due date may be restricted’ is superfluous and we’ll stop it from displaying in a future release.

Supervisor override

When an exception could be overridden but the operator lacks the required enablement, or their override level is insufficient to override a borrower or item message, then Soprano offers the option for a supervisor with the required enablement or level to sign in and complete the transaction. The session of the original operator is temporarily suspended. Several transactions can be overridden in this way at once by selecting the required outcome rows. When completed (i.e. after pressing the Override button), the supervisor is automatically signed out and the original operator’s session is resumed. The transactions are logged in the database as created by the supervisor.

The following video (nine minutes) gives an introduction to the handling of exceptions in Soprano:

Borrower On Loan adjustments

The On Loan tab is now placed first and is the default open tab when you visit a borrower page. It has switched places with the Profile tab.

Under the On Loan tab there is no longer the option to Return the item. You probably have the item in hand, so you can go to the Return Items page via the button in either the Home page or the Resources page, and scan the item to return it.

Sorting borrower loan history

You can now sort a borrower’s loan history. Click the column headings to sort, descending or ascending, by Title, Author, Borrowed date or Returned date. The default order is Returned date descending.

Re-use new borrower details as a template

When you create a borrower record you now have the option to carry forward some data from this record to the next. This would, for example, expedite the enrolment of a family.

Clicking Reuse Borrower Details brings up a new borrower form with the following fields populated from the previous record:

• Last name
• Guarantor
• Borrower type
• Home site
• Department
• Postcode
• Address details
• Phone number

Re-used borrower details in a new borrower form, showing the fields that have been populated from the previous record.

Analysis and Interest in Create Borrower

The create borrower form now includes fields for adding Analysis and Interest labels. They behave the same as the existing fields in the Borrower > Information > Membership edit form – click in the field to get a menu of labels to select from. You can add multiple labels into each field, and remove individual labels.

Borrower type in borrower search results

The Borrower Type now displays instead of Status in the borrower search results list.

Borrower expiry imminent – alert

When a borrower’s account is due to expire within one month, Soprano will now display an amber alert on the borrower picture and against the expiry date under the Information tab.

Clicking the Reset button will update the borrower’s expiry date in accordance with your configuration settings.

Delete a borrower

Borrowers can now be set to Deleted status in the borrower header edit form. Select the pencil control to open the edit form. Two radio buttons are displayed at the bottom of the form, allowing you to switch the status between Active and Deleted.

At Deleted status it is no longer possible to issue anything further to the borrower, or renew anything they have on loan. It is possible to return items that may be on loan to them – the borrower information is displayed in grey and their deleted status is indicated.

Renewing loans – new features

Soprano now has a dedicated page to renew loans. You can access it via a new Renew Items button on the Home page and the Resources page.

You can quickly renew loans by scanning the item barcodes. You can specify whether a renewal is seen or unseen (the default is Seen) and you have the option to set a manual due date.

Renewal from the borrower On Loan page also now includes the Seen/Unseen setting and the option to set a manual due date. Instead of the Renew button against each item you now find a tick box, and there is a Renew Selected button instead of Renew All. Loans are selected for renewal by default unless they were issued today and are not due back today.

The Renew Selected button takes you to the new Renew Items page with the outcome(s) displayed.

Printing Reservation and Transit slips

When satisfying a reservation or transiting an item for a reservation the system now offers the option to print a slip to go in the item.

Mark items as seen – exception alerts

When an item is scanned in the task Mark item as seen Soprano will now report the following conditions and offer options to resolve them:

• The item is in transit
• It is on loan
• It belongs to another site
• It has a query
• Its status has the code WDN

Item statuses in drop down lists

The drop-down list of item statuses that can be assigned in the Update item status task and in Add Item has been amended to exclude values that are reserved for use by the system, such as Order Sent and Received. Furthermore, when Soprano finds that the current status of the item is such that the requested change is not valid, it gives a notice indicating that the change has not been performed – for example, when the current status is 10 meaning ‘Query’.

Pick items for stock rotation

The Home page has two new options:

• Pick items for stock rotation
• Pick items for stock rotation in area

The Stock Rotation Pick List shows the items that are due for stock rotation and that are on the shelf at the login site. Select Pick items for stock rotation in area to choose which area of the library (defined in Manage areas) you want to look in for items due for stock rotation, or select Pick items for stock rotation to see the list for the whole site.

The list is the equivalent of the pick list produced by the script item_rotate.pl except that it excludes items which are in transit.

At the shelf, as you find each specific copy (the barcodes need to match) you can use the tick to remove the item from the list or the X to move it to the bottom of the list if you have not found it.

Having collected items from the shelves, the next step is to Process picked items (in Tasks). Here you scan each item and Soprano directs you to put it into transit to its new home site.

If required, an item can be issued to someone after it has been put into transit. Soprano automatically takes it out of rotation transit and issues it to the borrower. When it is returned, Soprano will either automatically set it in transit and indicate that it should be sent to the relevant site for rotation (when Auto-transit is set on), or offer a Transit button (when Auto-transit is set off).

When the item arrives at its destination site you need to scan the item in Resources to display the Item details page and then click the Complete Transit button.

Reservations Pick List richer bib data

The item descriptions in the Reservations Pick List now have more title information and they include edition statements, enabling you to more easily identify the requested item at the shelf.

Offline developments

Terminology: Soprano Offline now uses the terms Issue and Return rather than Check-out and Check-in.

A new offline option has been provided for renew. When selected you are prompted to enter the borrower and item barcode to record the renewal and then click the Renew button.

The system confirms that the renewal has been recorded.

The offline queue information has been updated to show an estimate of the amount of space remaining on the device. This displays whenever the queue is accessed.

Circulation fixes

• The Return Items page now displays a row for each item returned rather than just the last two items. The row now includes the item barcode. The display persists until the operator moves away from the page or it times out.

• The Process Reservation button no longer displays when a reserved item is returned if the reservation is not yet effective.
• A borrower without a primary course is no longer assigned the first entry in the list of courses when their details are edited. The Primary Course field displays ‘No Primary Course’ when the record is being edited and it is blank when the record is saved.
• The ILLs tab on a borrower record now shows the correct report if more than one report is received on the same day by taking account of the time the report was added.

Local Data Services (LDS) requirements

The exceptions handling work in this release has built on a structural change that we introduced in LDS 2.0. That means that, with this Soprano release, LDS 1.x is no longer supported. This realises a change that we initially gave notice about in a blog post last July.

As always, the new Soprano features work best with the latest version of LDS, currently LDS 2.6. Further improvements, chiefly more informative handling of some of the exceptions, will come with LDS 2.7 which will be available after this Soprano release is live.

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 your live data.

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Wednesday 22nd March 2017.

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.

If you were unable to attend the Soprano Development Update webinar on Wednesday 18th January or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on the latest developments by watching the video of the webinar, below, or by downloading it.

The webinar covers:

• Demonstration of recent features, including aspects of:
  • Circulation
    • Manage reservation shelf — Pick reserved items improvements — Filters on Borrower ILL Requests and Reservations — Borrower Add a charge — Borrower Notifications — Resources search improvements — Item Query
  • Inter-library loans
    • Manage ILL Requests — Process unverified requests
  • Purchasing
    • Create Invoice/Credit note
• In development, coming soon:
  • Renew with seen/unseen, manual due date, etc
  • Circulation exception handling

Since the webinar ran out of time, we’ve made a follow-up video, further below, to give you a more complete view of the circulation exception handling features that are coming soon.

Circulation exception handling video. Please note: a more up-to-date remake of this video is available in the release notice for the March 2017 preview release of Soprano.

To keep up to date with the latest Soprano developments please register for the webinar on Wednesday 18^th January 2017 at 2.00 pm. This free webinar is open to all customers.

In this webinar we’ll demonstrate the latest Soprano developments, explain what’s coming next and give you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

Please click here to register for the webinar.

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

In the meantime you can keep up with the latest Soprano news and information on the Soprano blog and on the Soprano Forum, and propose and discuss ideas in Soprano Ideas.

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.

Update. This release switches off Query functionality when your LDS version is between 2.4.0 and 2.5.0 to avoid a serious issue that was discovered and could potentially occur in other libraries. This also affects the Transit feature since it is logically connected with Query functionality.

Both Query and Transit are restored when you have LDS 2.6, which is available now when you open a Support case to request it.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• New Home page derived from Tasks
• Faceted search results
• Spelling suggestions
• Other search improvements
• Work Holdings display changes
• Default home site in Create Borrower
• Borrower Reservations list filter
• Circulation and Stock Management fixes
• Create Work MARC record mappings
• Inter-Library Loans display changes
• Invoices
• Displaying a fund
• Funds list
• Open Orders list
• Serial holdings filters
• Acquisitions fixes
• Performance improvements
• Various security fixes

New Home page derived from Tasks

The Tasks page has been re-labelled Home, its contents have been re-organised and it is now the first tab and the default page when you sign in.

The Borrowers and Resources search boxes and action buttons are included at the top of the Home page, enabling you to search or initiate other key actions directly from this page. These are subject to the same enablements as on the Borrowers and Resources pages.

The tasks continue to be relevant to your location and subject to your enablements (more on this under ‘Circulation and Stock Management fixes’, below). The Purchasing and Inter Library Loans groups of tasks remain the same; the other tasks are now divided into two, more clearly defined groups: Reservations, and Stock Management.

Faceted search results

Facets for Location, Format and Collection are now available to refine search results. They are given as drop-down menus below the search box, showing the top five terms. Your current location is given as the first option in the Location facet menu (when it has at least one result) followed by four more in frequency order, enabling you to quickly limit results to the current location to help users find a local resource.

Your facet selections are shown above the search box, since they set the context of your search. They are retained on a new search, enabling you to explore within a limited set such as items in your branch library. You can remove selections in random order by clicking the x next to a selection either on the line of selections or in the relevant facet menu.

Spelling suggestions

Soprano now offers an alternative spelling of your query where appropriate, in the form: You could try this search instead: {alternative}. It works with single and multiple word terms; for example: ‘cognative psycolgy’ gets the suggestion ‘cognitive psychology’. Suggestions are given both when there are no results and when there are some results where the alternative also has substantial results.

Other search improvements

When you open the new Home page the cursor is in the Borrower search box by default, enabling you to immediately enter a query (if you’re enabled) or scan a borrower’s barcode. Similarly, when you open the Borrower page or the Resources page the focus is in the search box.

We’ve made single-word formats and locations searchable as keywords without needing expert qualifiers. For example testament dvd bromsgrove. We’re continuing to work on enabling this also for multi-word terms and names.

Work Holdings display changes

The Holdings tab is now the first in the line of tabs for a Work and it is the one that is open by default whenever you access a Work detail page.

Front line user services staff tend to be only interested in items that users can access and use, whilst other items, such as those that are withdrawn, can be a hindrance in the Work Holdings list. On the other hand, having a complete picture can be important for acquisitions and cataloguing work.

To help with this we’ve provided two filter options at the top of the  Work Holdings list: Active and All. The default is Active. The buttons include the count for each category so that you can see if there are more in the All category. The Active category is filtered according to the TAL_IN_STOCK environment variable or else TAL_NOT_IN_STOCK, so you have control over which items are included or excluded according to their status. If neither environment variable is specified then Active displays all copies.

Default home site in Create Borrower

When you create a new borrower record the Home Site now defaults to the current location where you are signed in.

Borrower Reservations list filter

We’ve introduced a filter under the Borrower Reservations tab with options Active and All. By default the Active filter is selected, displaying only reservations at Waiting collection, Active and Not Yet Effective status. This will mean the page will load more quickly when there are many historic reservations.  To see all reservations including historic ones, select All.

Circulation and Stock Management fixes

Due date in fine charge fix

In the Current and All Charges for a borrower, where the type of charge is Fine, Soprano now displays the correct due date that was exceeded to incur the fine.

Add borrower photo fix

You can now add or change a borrower picture. Click/tap the picture area in the borrower header to navigate and upload an image from your local file system.

Process reservations year published fix

Two-digit years occurring in the year published field of MARC records no longer trigger an error when scanning an item into Process Reservations.

Create borrower when no search results – fix

The Create Borrower button is now always displayed after a borrower search, including when there are no results, enabling you to immediately add the borrower.

Update item site task default site

The task Update item site on the Home page has a field Set site to, which now defaults to the current site where you are signed in, making it easier to perform the common job of changing the site of some items to the site where you are.

Suppressing Tasks on the Home page

It is now possible to suppress all the Tasks on the Home page. The enablements required for each task to display are given in the following table:

Manage shelves re-named to Manage areas
On the Home page we’ve re-named the Task Manage shelves to Manage areas to use the more accurate term ‘areas’ and to be consistent with its use already in lists.

Create Work MARC record mappings

We’ve improved the quality of the mapping of data from Create Work to the resulting MARC record. In the MARC Leader the Encoding level and the Descriptive cataloguing form now denote ‘Preliminary level’ and ‘ISBD punctuation omitted’. Field Indicator values are now set correctly. Dates, when entered, are now included in contributor fields (700/710/711 $d). Publication details now map to field 264, not 260. Multiple instances of notes fields are all included. Some LDS changes are in the pipeline to deal properly with fields 005, 035 and 040.

Inter-Library Loans display changes

The elements of an ILL request have been re-arranged to facilitate the request processing workflow. The header has been re-organised to show the requester first, to reduce the amount of information about the requested item and to include the supplier. Full details of the requested item are given under a Request tab.

Details of the request such as Supplier, Requirements, Delivery, Site and Dates are now re-organised under a tab labelled Fulfilment, whilst supplier reports are now included under a History tab.

Invoices

Creating an invoice has been added in this release and as a result the way in which invoice lines display has changed.

The Invoices page now has a CREATE INVOICE button next to the search box.

This gives you a form for entering the invoice number, supplier, invoice and payment due dates, amount payable and invoice currency. There are Invoice and Credit Note radio buttons for specifying the type of record you are creating (Invoice is set by default).

When you click CREATE INVOICE, the Invoice page displays the details you have entered and you can add invoice lines and charges as required.

Clicking Add invoice line displays fields for entering the order number, unit price and quantity, and buttons for adding tax, charges and discount, together with Cancel and Save buttons.

When you type in the order number, information on the number of copies ordered and received and the unit price pops up.

Clicking on this transfers the information to the Unit Price and Quantity fields.

Invoice-level charges are added via the Add Charge or Discount button.

When the value of the invoice matches the amount payable the PAY button displays.

Please note: invoice lines for part orders (i.e. where the number of items invoiced is less than the number of items on the order) and split rate VAT cannot currently be handled.

Displaying a fund

You can now bring up the record for a specific fund by selecting it from the list available on the Funds page.

Funds list

An Available column has been added to the Funds list to show at a glance the amount available to spend (i.e.  Fund Value minus Committed and Spent).

Open Orders list

The list of open orders now includes a Funds column. To accommodate this, the Supplier column has been changed to display supplier codes rather than names. You can select a fund to go to the fund record.

Serial holdings filters

Serial issues on the Holdings tab of a work can now be filtered by Location (i.e. delivery site) and/or Year only. The extraneous Volume and Issue filters have been removed.

Acquisitions fixes

Search in Orders, Open Orders and Invoices is no longer case-sensitive. This means, for example, that entering order number zz16000001 will match order ZZ16000001 if it exists.

Purchasing and its subordinate options now only display if you have the requisite permission. This operator, for example, does not have permission to view funds so the Funds option does not appear.

The RECEIVE button on the Item page now works correctly. This displays when you enter the barcode of an item that is on order and you are logged in at the item’s home site.

Performance improvements

When you select a borrower’s Information tab the page should load more quickly.

Various security fixes

We continually seek to improve the security of our web applications. In this release we’ve fixed issues relating to JavaScript injection and implemented httpOnly and Secure for cookies where possible, which mitigates the cross-site scripting risk.

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 your live data.

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Wednesday 14th December 2016.

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.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• Borrower Type displayed in Process Reservations
• Performance improvements
• ILL item barcode displayed in ILL form
• Reading older Danish Model RFID tags in the Soprano Wrapper
• Fund summary progress indication bars
• Miscellaneous fixes

Borrower Type displayed in Process Reservations

The borrower display in the Process Reservations form now includes the borrower type. This allows you to identify cases such as distance learners where you may wish to post the item to the borrower rather than put it on the reservation shelf or transit it to another branch.

Performance improvements

A borrower’s reservations list should now load more quickly.  This will be more noticeable with longer lists.

ILL item barcode displayed in ILL form

When an ILL requested item has been received and a barcode has been entered in the item record, that barcode number is now displayed in the ILL Request form, letting you know that that part of the process has been done.

Reading older Danish Model RFID tags in the Soprano Wrapper

Some RFID tags that date from before the rigorous standardisation that now exists can be problematic to read. Software that reads them needs to apply special treatment. This has now been implemented in the Soprano Wrapper (which enables Soprano to communicate with devices such as tills and RFID tag readers via the computer device being used to access Soprano).

Fund summary progress indication bars

The Fund Summary page includes progress bars illustrating the proportions of the fund that have been committed and spent. Problems with the display of the bars in some browsers has been fixed.

Miscellaneous fixes

• In Borrower search, some issues with the correct retrieval and sorting of borrowers are now fixed.
• In Create Work the work import feature is now working again rather than giving an error. From Resources, choose Create Work to get the Create Work form; put a new ISBN into the Identifier field and press Get Work.
  
• In the Orders list a bug where some orders would lack bibliographic data from the Work has been fixed.

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 your live data.

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Thursday 22nd September 2016.

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.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release includes:

• Alert that an item is an inter-library loan
• MARC record download and upload
• Fund Summary  information re-organised
• Performance improvements
• Local Data Services (LDS) version notice
• Miscellaneous fixes

Alert that an item is an inter-library loan

In the header of an item that is an inter-library loan some information is now given about that state, following the same pattern as for other states such as in transit. This includes a blue label ‘Interloan’ together with the request number, the requester’s name and the name of the supplier. Those three attributes are hyperlinked, allowing the operator to navigate respectively to the request, the requester, and the supplier.

Local Data Services (LDS) version required: the current latest version.

MARC record download and upload

The option to view the MARC record for a work was released recently. Now, when viewing the MARC record, you have the options to download it as a file to your local machine, and to upload a replacement record.

The downloaded file is a MARC 21 record in the Format for Information Exchange (ISO 2709). It is named {BibID}.mrc, for example 123456.mrc.

The Upload option opens the file navigation window on your machine so that you can find and select the file to upload. It must be a single MARC 21 record in the Format for Information Exchange (ISO 2709) and the control number (in field 001) must match the BibID of the record that you want to replace. The file is checked for these requirements and an error message is displayed when the file does not conform.

This means that you could use a third party tool, such as MarcEdit, to edit a MARC record. Currently, if you want to ensure the record is valid in detailed ways, for example Leader and 008 lengths and values,  you would need to use an external validation tool.

LDS version required: the current latest version.

Fund Summary information re-organised

The Fund header no longer has the Committed and Spent dials, and the information under the Summary tab has been supplemented and re-organised to give appropriate information clearly.

The summary now shows:

• Fund value: the amount, annotated with the Allocated and Carried forward amounts. On an aggregate fund the annotation also states the number of funds (including the current one) from which the Fund Value is summed
• Committed: the amount committed for items that have not yet been paid for, annotated with the number of items.
• Spent: the amount, annotated with the number of items and the amount as a percentage of the Fund value
• Total committed: the amount, annotated with the number of items and the amount as a percentage of the Fund value
• Uncommitted: the amount not committed from the Fund value
• Notes: displayed on the right-hand side of the page

The Commitment and Expenditure warning amounts are displayed on a Base fund at the foot of the summary, as previously.

LDS version required: 2.3 or higher (i.e. for access to Funds).

Performance improvements

We’ve made some changes that should mean that:

• The Work Holdings tab page  loads more quickly
• The Borrower Current charges and All Charges tabs pages load more quickly
• The Invoices list and any filtered view of it should load more quickly.

LDS version required: As required for the specific features.

Local Data Services (LDS) version notice

In a recent blog post we clarified the relationship between Soprano feature areas and LDS versions, as well as the Alto/LMS version required for a given LDS version. The blog post also explains that soon Soprano issue, renew and return will no longer work with LDS versions 1.x, so you should ensure that you are running a minimum of LMS 5.7 and LDS 2.0 before September 2016.

To help remind you to upgrade, this release displays a notice when you sign in if your LDS version is lower than 2.0 and  your operator enablements include Utilities – limiting the notice to the more enabled staff. The notice tells you that your current version of LDS is unsupported and to contact us to arrange an upgrade. To continue working you can select any tab (Borrowers, Resources, etc.).

Additionally, you can find out about your current version of LDS when you are signed in to Soprano by setting the URL in the browser address bar to

https://soprano.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{tenant name}/support/version

If the version is lower than 2.0 then you will see the notice mentioned above.

If it is supported but not the latest then you will see a notice recommending that you upgrade.

If it is up to date than you will see a notice confirming that.

LDS version required: Any.

Miscellaneous fixes

• When there are no results for a filtered Orders list, rather than getting an error you now see in the results area a notice: ‘There are no orders matching your query’.
• Reservation fees and miscellaneous charges are now listed with the correct type name on till receipts, rather than appearing as fines.
  
• When submitting a newly created borrower the PIN is now saved.

LDS version required: As required for the specific features.

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 your live data.

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Thursday 11th August 2016.

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.

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.