May 2008 Newsletter

  • Athenaeum and Kamar
  • remote support
  • Now is a good time for feature requests
  • Have you watched any of our screen movies?
  • Athenaeum in the Resource Room?

Athenaeum Pro and Kamar

Kamar is a widely used school administration program in New Zealand secondary schools. This month, Kamar Ltd and SumWare Consulting have announced the inclusion of Athenaeum Pro software with Kamar 9 licenses for their schools. The announcement was made at the annual Kamar conference. The Kamar Conference held in Rotorua early this month attracted over 300 teaching and administrative staff and the feedback was very positive.

The image at right shows Rob Russell (Director, SumWare Consulting), Kent Lendrum (Director Kamar Ltd) Desiree de Kleynen (Director, SumWare Consulting) at the conference after the announcement, ably assisted by "George" with the brochures. Click to zoom in.

Both programs are based on the powerful FileMaker software suite and integrate well. Kamar 9 will automatically update borrower lists within Athenaeum Pro as students enter or leave a school or change details. The two programs share the same servers and backup routines and provide a single point of management for your IT staff.

Remote support

With Athenaeum distributed around the world, it is obvious that we have never been able to visit many of our sites. We are frequently exploring new ways of supporting these sites. Recently, a new class of remote log-in software has become available that has made remote log-in easy enough for non-technical computer users to install.

Remote log-in is where someone can connect to your computer via the internet, see your screen and optionally "use" your mouse and keyboard to help you.

A very good package we have had success with is LogMeIn Free. The free package (it really is free!) is installed on your computer and activated. Then we - or anyone you authorise - can log into your computer. We can show you how to perform tasks, make changes, even upgrade your software.

And you don't need to be a "distant" client. Travel time to "local" clients can be removed which can only mean savings.

We also use other remote log-in programs, such as Timbuktu, Remote Desktop Connection, VNC and Apple Remote Desktop, so there may be a package suited to your computer environment. Remote support must be in accordance with your organisation's computer policies and should be managed responsibly. If you would like to explore this option, please discuss this with us.

Feature requests

SumWare Consulting are hard at work on a major revision of Athenaeum Pro.

Over the years, the development of the product has been driven by requests from you, the users. This is still true, so if there are things you would like to see, please do not hesitate to ask. There are no guarantees your requests will appear in the next version, though we guarantee we won't add your request if you don't tell us what it is!

"Screencasts"

Have you viewed any of the Screencasts (movies) on our support web site? Did you remember we are publishing these movies?

Go to the Athenaeum Tech Notes web page and click the movies link on the left. Or click this link and have a quick look (your computer will need the free QuickTime software to view the movies).

If there are topics you would like to see covered with a screencast, then please do send an e-mail with your request which we will try to accommodate.

Athenaeum in the Resource Room?

Schools running Athenaeum Pro have the option of either keeping their resource catalogue combined with the normal library catalogue (Athenaeum Pro has methods for managing these in most searches) or installing a distinct copy of Athenaeum Pro in their resource room. This makes sense when resource catalogues are large or you are interacting with your resources only at particular times of the year (e.g. when issuing/returning text books to students).

SumWare Consulting can provide current Athenaeum Pro users with complementary templates for your resource library should you want to them. Please ask us how you might implement this at your organisation.