Re: [VuFind-General] Support Implications of VuFind

[Demian K. <dem...@vi...>]

Since VuFind was developed here at Villanova, my answers to your questions may not be typical… but hopefully they'll be some help nonetheless!

1.) Getting from installation to going live depends a great deal on your comfort with the technologies involved and with how much customization you need to do to meet your needs.  I've heard of the process taking anywhere from a couple of months to a year, depending on the degree of development involved.

2.) I currently spend most of my time supporting the VuFind community and developing new features for VuFind.  Providing support for our actual locally-running VuFind instance generally takes me only a couple of hours a week at most.  It took quite an investment of time to get things fully automated (see my notes at http://vufind.org/wiki/automation), but the system mostly runs itself now that I've found the right balance.  The most common issue these days involves explaining unexpected query results (bad ranking, missing results, etc.) and (if necessary) tweaking the configuration to compensate.  We've just upgraded from a post-RC1 version of VuFind to a post-RC2 version, so there have been a cluster of questions recently related to the changed search behavior caused by the introduction of Dismax.  Bottom line: you may need to devote some significant resources to VuFind initially and around upgrade times, but if you get it into a good rhythm, it shouldn't be a constant support commitment.

3.) Installing VuFind took most of the emphasis away from the Voyager web catalog, but it didn't completely replace the old system.  We no longer devote any resources to customizing the look and feel of the Voyager OPAC since VuFind is now our primary interface, but we do still need some technical resources to keep it running in the background since some of the librarians still use it for advanced features, and patrons need it for placing holds.

- Demian

From: an...@ae... [mailto:an...@ae...]
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 6:47 AM
To: vuf...@li...
Subject: [VuFind-General] Support Implications of VuFind

I wonder if those who have implemented VuFind would be able to answer some questions on the support implications...




The three questions I had specifically thought of were:



1. How long did it take to get from installing VuFind to going live?



2. What is the support commitment (in terms of amount of time per week) needed for VuFind?



3. Did the installation of VuFind replace any other interface(s) you were using? and if so did this mean you were able to redirect support away from this/these other product(s) to VuFind?







Thanks ever so much,

Andy Ekins