It seems to me that the tiered support model for software products in
far from a new thing. The manufacturer puts a product into the
marketplace through a distribution chain. At each stop on the chain,
Manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, in-house support group, and end
user there are some levels of support provided.
The thing I keep seeing folks get confused about is the way the
transaction happens in the open source community. Whether you "buy"
Oracle or PostgreSQL as your database, there are plenty of suppliers
and support tiers for each one. My price to consult on the admin for
either one is the same.
I suspect that while it's true that at any given moment in time, a
given ILS implementation has a primary support resource, the more
choices that become availablewill yield higher turnover, more
specialization and/ or better quality of service.
Let's hope for a bit of all three?
Stev3 Wills
Free Lance Nerd.
On Nov 18, 2011, at 4:09 PM, Ian Walls wrote:
Marshall,
It's not so much an 'edge-case' as a generalization. Product and
Company are two separate things to track with an N to M
relationship. Any given company can support multiple products (as
has been true for many years) and a product can be supported by
multiple companies (this tends to only be true of open source
products, but not necessarily; a company could have a license with
another to support their proprietary system).
I'd be happy to help make the necessary structural changes to the
system to support this generalization; I know time is tight, and
it's probably more important to me right now than you. But given
the trends in open source ILS systems (more people adopting, very
few leaving), this is only going to become more and more common as
time goes by.
Cheers,
-Ian
On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Marshall Breeding <[email protected]
> wrote:
MJ,
The survey needs to cover the automation scenarios in place in most
libraries. Within any given niche, there may be some quirks, but
almost all
ILS implementations contract for support only from a single
organization.
In rare cases, there may be additional contracts to other vendors for
development tasks, but the question focuses on support. I don't want
to
design the survey around edge cases that rarely occur.
In this year's survey, I've added an additional factor for libraries
to
indicate whether they receive support directly from their "ILS
vendor" or
through an intermediary such as through another library or
consortium. This
gives me a way to analyze the results in a way that accommodates the
situation in many consortia where the first-line support happens
locally
with only unresolved issues being directed to the contracted support
organization.
Libraries responding to the survey can always provide additional
information
in the comments field to explain any special circumstances, and
often they
do.
I publish summaries of the survey responses in a way that protects the
confidentiality of the responders. I do not plan to release the
data beyond
that. While it may be possible to scrub and normalize the data in a
way
that it could be shared publicly, it would take more effort beyond
what I
already put in to the survey. You are the only one that I recall
that has
asked for this in the five years that I have been running this survey.
Best regards,
-marshall
Marshall Breeding
Editor, Library Technology Guides
http://www.librarytechnology.org
[email protected]
http://twitter.com/mbreeding
-----Original Message-----
From: MJ Ray [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 1:15 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ILS Perceptions survey (Marshall Breeding)
"Marshall Breeding" <[email protected]>
> I do hope that all libraries using Koha will respond to the survey.
> The survey forms are linked to each library's entry in the
> lib-web-cats directory, so you will need to submit an entry if your
> library is not already represented. A large number of libraries
using
> Koha are already represented, but I'm sure that there are many still
missing. See:
Hi Marshall. Usual requests. Please could you decouple the outdated
one-to-one relationship between LMSes and support companies?
And would you release (some subset of) the data as Open Access, Free
and
Open Source Software in a nice ready-to-analyse format this year?
It would be great to see an Open survey which reflected the reality
of the
new LMS support landscape. Maybe one of the above in 2011, one in
2012?
Thanks,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit
co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former
lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work through http://www.software.coop/
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--
Ian Walls
Lead Development Specialist
ByWater Solutions
Phone # (888) 900-8944
http://bywatersolutions.com
[email protected]
Twitter: @sekjal
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