On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:05 AM, Josh Welker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ...Alma and WMS ... 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...
Nominally, this is true. But these systems look more similar on the surface
than they are so it really does depend on what you need. A good candidate
for Alma probably is not a good candidate for WMS and vice versa. The
reasons for this are better explained in a phone call than an email, but it
boils down to the fact that every system is based on assumptions about who
uses what and and how -- and the differences in these assumptions are
important. The best way to get a feel for what to expect would be to do a
field trip to a library that has similar needs to your own for each system
and talk directly to staff of all levels.
The SaaS vs. PaaS distinction is not that significant if the vendor does
the actual maintenance. On an aside note, a growing number of SaaS
providers are partially or fully hosted on PaaS vendors such as Amazon.
Alma falls into this category. For example, if you have a lot of digital
inventory with thumbnail, access, and master copies, each with different
access restrictions, you can upload it directly with descriptive and
administrative metadata directly to S3 and just appears in Alma.
On the platform issue, it also would be a mistake to make assumptions about
what kind of data it's even possible to share. You may find that you can
share much less where everyone is on the same system than you could on a
distributed system because of baked in privacy/security assumptions -- this
has huge implications for what you can do.
The short version of this long email is to arrange a few site visits -- the
info you'll get is 1000 times better than anything you can get remotely.
Given the magnitude of an ILS investment, it will be well worth it.
kyle
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