Hi Kyle,

Certainly Alma and WMS have different products, but to call them "very
different" is misleading in the same way it would be misleading to call
Voyager and Millennium "very different." They have essentially the same
core features, albeit quite different workflows and interfaces. After
viewing several hours of demos for Alma and WMS, I can say pretty
confidently that they are two products trying to solve the same problems in
relatively similar ways and that the way they do it is distinct from other
products in the ILS marketplace right now. Yes, just about any ILS system
can be hosted in the cloud, but there is a major distinction between the
Software-as-a-Service model of WMS and Alma and the Platform-as-a-Service
model where you have a dedicated server with a dedicated instance of your
software that has to be maintained separately from all other instances and
has data totally isolated from all other instances. Beyond that, the way
Alma and WMS integrates electronic resource workflows and KBs is quite
different from what other ILS systems do.

Given that these two products are sort of in their own class, I was hoping
to learn what other libraries think about working with them compared to
working with old ILS systems. I think my use of the word "migrating" in the
email title has given the impression that what I am most interested in is
the migration process, but that part seems fairly straightforward and does
not concern me much.

Joshua Welker
Information Technology Librarian
James C. Kirkpatrick Library
University of Central Missouri
Warrensburg, MO 64093
JCKL 2260
660.543.8022


On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 8:56 AM, Josh Welker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > .... We are
> > looking at Alma and WMS specifically because they are entirely
> cloud-based
> > and redesigned from the ground up for modern workflows involving
> > e-resources, knowledgebases, discovery, etc....
>
>
> Alma and WMS are very different products that will be best for different
> libraries, so I'd be careful about limiting to those two.
>
> When you get right down to it, all cloud based really means is "stuff that
> someone else maintains" and there are enough options that can be done with
> almost any system these days. As far as migrating data goes, it's always
> about what you have, how you're using it, and how the target system is set
> up. It just so happens I've helped move data into both Alma and WMS but the
> issues are the same regardless of what you're moving to/from -- namely
> extracting the data as completely as possible and getting both the content
> and structure into a form that meets your needs in the new system.
>
> Since the whole point of migrating is to get to a system that works
> differently, this means configuration is different. The types of records
> and fields are different. Even when records and fields appear similar, they
> use data differently. As such, understanding what people are doing now and
> what they need to happen is way harder than the parsing and manipulation
> necessary to transfer data to the new system.
>
> kyle
>