Polaris ILS Advisory Committee (PIAC) February 2024 Newsletter
PIAC met with Innovative on Monday, February 26, 2024 to discuss several items.
Polaris 7.6
The release for Polaris 7.6 is on track and is scheduled for April. The Innovative team is preparing to announce the exact release date soon and will be sharing a lot of the new features at IUG 2024. You can preview some of the new features through the Polaris – Innovative Product Status Board. Special mention goes to the Advanced Marc Editor and Bulk Waive/Resolve Fines, we are all excited to learn more about these features at IUG.
LEAP: Technical Services Functions
New features will be announced with the release of 7.6 at IUG in March. There will be a bucket dedicated to acquisitions functions for the release of 7.7. If you are at IUG this year, share the barriers you are having with cataloguing, acquisitions and other technical services functions as reducing these barriers is a business priority for Innovative in 2025. The goal is to complete the Technical Services development for LEAP in 2025.
PAPI Development
There are some challenges with libraries who are moving away from using SIP and focusing on Polaris API calls in that the API is not able to block or follow ILS rules in the same manner as SIP. Specifically this has been challenging for libraries using self-checkouts or lockers, who are moving away from SIP.
While there are no specific plans for development on the roadmap, this could be brought forward through the new Member-Exclusive Enhancements Process (MEEP), which would be started in Idea Exchange and then voted up. If you missed the announcement regarding MEEP, you can learn more through the IUG website about the working groups and the process.
Offline Circulation
While we learned at our latest PIAC meeting that there are many ways organizations support offline circulation, the Innovative implementations team is fully supporting LEAP Offline Circulation. Improvements to LEAP Offline Circulation are not on the roadmap yet but may arrive there if voted in via the MEEP process.
Web-based System Administration (SA Web)
This area will be a focus for Innovative for 2025 and is included under the umbrella of improving barriers of web-based products both in LEAP and for system administration. In 7.4 SSO was introduced for both LEAP and SA Web but there is only one IDP connection supported at a time for SA Web, for larger consortia SA Web may not meet your needs yet. Stay tuned as more work is completed on oauth configuration for LEAP and SA Web.
Receipt Customizations
Receipt text is currently hard-coded and there is interest amongst Innovative customers to customize the language used on in-transit and holds receipts. There nothing on the roadmap for this yet and you can vote on it in Idea Exchange to help it move up the development channel. A good place to start would be to pick one type of receipt for customization (i.e. holds slips or in-transit) and then that work could be expanded once completed for that specific receipt. We hope to see this in Idea Exchange soon!