Hosted vs Local Installs

Polaris
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Has anyone moved from a local install of Polaris to a hosted install?

I am curious about the performance and possible variations. The reason I ask is, with our current network configuration, our branches bounce around VPN tunnel for access back to the servers hosted at the Main Library and this can result in some lag time between scanning and info coming up.

Thanks in advance.

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The list of issue mentioned here is also probably worth going through as you consider making the change.

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Thanks Wes! I am not sure where we will land ultimately but I do want to give our rep a chance to make her sales pitch.

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I’d 100% be out of the hardware business if I could. Having a “buck stops here” single phone call no matter what the issue has lots of upsides. That is, assuming you get satisfactory answers to all your questions/concerns.

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Performance-wise, I would say it’s been mostly positive. We migrated because we were having a ton of instability on our own servers (Polaris regularly crashing and being totally inaccessible until we restarted the servers, sometimes multiple times a week) so moving to hosted has definitely led to us having less down time, but not none. Client-wise, we started having an issue where RemoteApp abruptly disconnects for 1-5 minutes at a time that Innovative has not been able to resolve - an annoyance for back of house staff but really bad for circ staff if you’re still using the client on circ desks. Leap-wise, performance has been average; we’ve had to reach out to Innovative maybe 2-3 times a month on average regarding issues like Leap hanging, search giving weird error messages, etc. Overall, probably worth it in our case considering how often it was going down.

I second Chris Heineman’s post as well, especially re: the registry change (Polaris provided this info but only after we reported the errors) and the variable performance of ScrewDrivers (particularly a problem on ExpressChecks). In addition:

  • Be aware that you will lose the ability to have ANY custom SQL jobs. This was an issue for us that wasn’t communicated well prior to migration (our site manager thought we would be able to but this later turned out to be untrue). We now have to do a few jobs manually that previously ran automatically. You’ll also lose the ability to make updates to the database via SQL.
  • We are a consortium with 21 member libraries and we had to get external IP addresses from each location to ensure they were all able to access Polaris. Many of our smaller libraries struggled with this and they didn’t all have static IP addresses, so just be prepared for hand-holding.
  • Oh also apparently Polaris will move to charging you based on how many RemoteApp users you have instead of how many workstations you have??
  • Be prepared for a pretty significant transition for staff. We changed our URL and the domain staff use to log in, and the Leap login process takes a few seconds longer than it used to, and we still, over a year later, get questions about it. But if you’re currently having significant lag time, this may be worth it for staff.

Sorry for a long post lol, hopefully some of this is useful :smile:

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Hi Eleanor,
I’d love to know more about your experience of Leap hanging and search giving weird error messages. Has Innovative gave you any answers as to why that has been happening? We will solely be using Leap except for a small number of Collections staff so will be relying heavily on that application.
We will be going live with 7.7, has it been an issue with the later releases? Does it typically require Innovative to restart the Leap server?
Thanks,
Aaron

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Hello Aaron! We are on 7.6 as of this past November. In a couple of cases no cause was found, in other cases restarting ERMS resolved the issue. There was also one instance where it appeared to be hanging because the holds processing job got stuck? I would say a lot of our reports are isolated cases we don’t bother reporting to Innovative, with just one or two staff members being affected, and those seem to resolve on their own much of the time. Not hugely impactful, but not something I have records of happening before we moved to hosted.

I can’t speak to staff perceptions with 100% confidence, but outside of those reports staff don’t primarily seem to think of Leap as super buggy. I think the main frustrations are with the lack of feature parity and the find tool, which don’t have anything to do with being hosted.

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