February 2008 Newsletter

  • Welcome back
  • Quick Look Back at 2007
  • Movies on Tech Notes
  • Importing Borrowers
  • Using Athenaeum to Track Assets?
  • PHP Interface for Server
  • Custom changes and utilities
  • Training
  • Athenaeum Light Time limited promotion
  • External Authentication

Welcome back

Welcome back to school or work if you are in the southern hemisphere (for northern hemisphere friends, Australia/New Zealand go pretty quiet during the extended summer holiday). We managed two weeks off here and have otherwise been running around with some interesting developments.

Quick Look Back at 2007

A quick look over our notes from the year just gone and I realised it was quite a full year. I know some of you missed our announcements, some of the highlights included:

  • Vista compatibility for Pro and Express
  • OS X 10.5 compatibility for Pro and Express
  • Athenaeum Pro 7.6 released with integrated MARC reader rather than a separate utility
  • Express 8.5 released (also with integrated MARC utility)
  • Book Cover, Locator images into Athenaeum Pro
  • 37 tech notes published (wow! I didn't think it was that many) including a number of tutorial style "movies"
  • direct uploads to SumWare's web server and faster turn around of upgrades (on average, 1 hour)
  • released some companion products
  • continuously revised web site

I'm sure I have omitted a few things there. 2008 is promising to be an interesting year and you will, no doubt, hear about that in the fullness of time.

Movies on Tech Notes

A number of people I talk to are not aware of the tutorial movies on the web site. These are QuickTime movies that walk you through some processes that we get asked about (e.g Showing book covers from the web, processing MARC). QuickTime is free for both Macs and PCs so you should be able to view these (you will need a good, fast internet connection).

Click this link just to see the movies

Importing Borrowers

For southern hemisphere schools with new pupil lists, please be aware that it is generally easy to import data from most school admin systems. You rarely have to re-type data, so contact us if you are not sure what to do.

We have, for a few clients, created customised utilities that automatically synchronise borrower data with school admin systems. There are some new features in FileMaker Pro 9 that make this possible with a wider range of systems, so if you have a school with a high turnover of students (and hence borrowers), this could be a useful option.

Just on that note, we are sometimes asked why we don't just directly use the admin system instead of copying the data into Athenaeum. The short answer is that we store additional information in Athenaeum that is of no use to the admin system and we don't usually have access to the internals of the administration systems. Likewise, there is often a lot of information that in the administration systems that is not relevant to Athenaeum.

Using Athenaeum to Track Assets?

There are quite a few organisations that are using a second copy of Athenaeum or a copy of Athenaeum Light for storing their assets. Athenaeum is quite capable of doing this. In on sense, it is quite underused when put to this purpose. However, there are a number of financial considerations that Athenaeum does not undertake for assets because this is generally beyond the scope of the library.

Last year, we released the SumWare Asset Register, a package that allows you to track assets; manage the financials including such things as "partial disposals" and choices in depreciation methods; track "non-assets" for insurance and inventory purposes.

This package is economically priced and more detail can be found on our web site.

SumWare Asset Register

PHP Interface for Server

There are a variety of techniques for sharing Athenaeum data onto the web.

With the release last year of FileMaker Server 9, a new and very powerful option using PHP became available.

PHP is a web scripting language, open source, that lets programmers manipulate data in powerful ways. It is fast and offers controls that end users have not previously had with Athenaeum.

We have some basic templates that sites can integrate into their existing web sites, so do contact us if you are interested or want to know more.

Custom changes and utilities

As alluded to above, SumWare Consulting do custom development of companion utilities to Athenaeum as well as custom solutions for matters unrelated to library.

There are times when we will customise Athenaeum for a site. This has benefits in that you can achieve a very tailored solution to your needs, however, you will break out of the simple upgrade path. If this is something you would like to explore, please contact us.

Training

Each year we offer reasonably-priced workshops (both beginner and intermediate/advanced) in Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga to suit demand. Please contact Desiree..@sumware.co.nz to register your interest. If there are enough schools requiring training in one area we will organise sessions to suit the requirements.

Desiree is also planning training in Canterbury (NZ South Island, not Great Britain!) for 18 April 2008, so please contact her if you are interested.

In the meantime on-site one-on-one (customised) training is always available by arrangement.

Athenaeum Light Time limited promotion

Until mid March 2008, we are offering Athenaeum Light 7 licenses through a special offer at:-

http://www.sumware.net/request_code/please.php

If you have any version of Athenaeum and you want to keep resources or some other type of object in a managable system but away from your library, this could be a nice way to do it.

If you know of small libraries (including very small libraries like Toy Libraries) who would like basic computer management of their resources, then pass the word on.

External Authentication

As computers take over more and more of our daily lives, we sometimes find ourselves trying to manage more and more accounts and passwords. Centralised network password management (authentication) reduces this requirement and is quite popular on medium and large networks.

An update to Athenaeum Pro that will be released in early February that will allow network administrators to simplify your log-ins by including five types of authentication in their network's Active Directory or Open Directory. External authentication requires FileMaker Server 9 with your Athenaeum. Please contact us if you want to know more.