Polaris ILS Advisory Committee (PIAC) June 2023 Newsletter
PIAC met with Innovative on Monday, June 26 to discuss the 7.5 release, LX Starter and more.
Polaris 7.5 Release
PIAC asked if the 7.5 release was still on track for a September 2023 release. The development team is currently determining how much time they need to finish wrapping development. They will need additional time to finish some of the larger items in the upgrade list. Currently, development is internally planning for a later October release. The product board has been updated to reflect a Q4 release.
LX Starter and Upgrades
A few libraries reported issues with LX Starter notices not being delivered after upgrading to 7.4. PIAC asked whether Vega services need to be restarted after an upgrade, and if this step could be added to support’s upgrade checklist to prevent disruption to notices.
Jesse Jensen confirmed that while jobs and services carry over after an upgrade, sometimes SQL jobs and services need to be started to ensure they are running correctly with no errors. This item has been added to support’s upgrade checklist to prevent issues in the future.
Jesse will check in with the Vega team to determine whether services or jobs may need to be run or restarted for libraries that are preparing to publish notices in LX Starter, in case the Vega services are not actively running for those libraries.
Vega Product Staff Permissions
Currently, any staff account added to LX Starter is assigned full admin permissions for Vega Discover. PIAC asked when granular permissions would be available for the different modules, and whether there would be a centralized location to control those permissions.
Samantha Quell brought this item to the Vega team. She shared that there is no timeline commitment for this yet because the Vega team does quarterly planning (as opposed to annual planning for the ILS). However, the item is in development queue. They’ve received several requests for it, and it’s currently one of the top enhancement requests for Vega.
There currently is work being done to allow libraries to manage Vega staff user permissions by connecting it to the library’s Polaris Active Directory. One challenge to implementing this solution is that hosted customers can’t add users to custom groups though Active Directory; only support can do this.
Leap Offline
Leap offline is currently not usable for many libraries due to its reliance on browser cache. PIAC asked whether there were plans to develop Leap offline further.
Samantha Quell shared that there have previously been discussions about Leap offline, but at the time, there were not a lot of libraries that needed to use offline regularly. The item has not bumped up in development’s priority list. Samantha recommended adding this enhancement to Idea Exchange to gain traction. They would like to make improvements to Leap offline, but need to fit it into their development schedule.
An idea has been added to Idea Exchange: Improve Leap Offline by not relying on saved data in the browser cache. If this development would be important for your library, head over to Idea Exchange to vote and comment!
Axis 360 Transitioning to Boundless
Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 platform will be transitioning to a new platform called Boundless. See more information here. PIAC asked whether we should expect any disruptions to Polaris Axis360 integration after the switchover.
Samantha Quell reached out to Baker and Taylor to discuss. B&T confirmed that there should be no disruption of service. This change is similar the Overdrive’s switch to the Libby app—both Axis360 and Boundless will use the same back end, so there should not be any downtime for integration.
Existing Axis360 links will redirect for a temporary amount of time. Once the redirects are removed, links in resource entities may need to be updated. Samantha will check in with Baker and Taylor to get more information on what to expect. If URLs need to be changed, Clarivate will provide some type of SQL script to help update them.
Updated PIAC Roster
PIAC welcomed several new members to the group in June. View the updated roster on the IUG website.
If you have questions, concerns, frustrations, praise, suggestions, the PIAC is here to represent you to Clarivate. Please feel free to reach out to Debra (dwischmeyer@ccslib.org) or any PIAC member.