Why LEAP in to a BLUEcloud when Koha Delivers Web Based Functionality Standard?

by Nathan Curulla on Apr 23, 2014

Some of the recent big news in the proprietary software world is that many of the larger companies are finally starting to try to make their existing systems web based. This is great news for their existing customers, except for the fact that they will need to pay more for these features and, as is usually the case, the companies are just piling on more layers of software atop a system that was developed over 20 years ago. Library Journal recently published a great article titled Putting the Pieces Together. ByWater was lucky enough to have been interviewed for the open source portion of this article, some of which can be read on the Library Journal site.

The article was very interesting and informative, but as I read through it I was surprised to see that many of the new features being promoted by the larger ILS companies already exist in Koha. In fact, most of the features that fell into this category have been in Koha for close to 10 years! I’m talking of course of the web, or cloud, based functionality of the system and the conformity to web standards for use on all mobile devices. Koha has had a mobile friendly theme since 2012 and a fully responsive theme since the beginning of this year, and before that you could still access the OPAC on a phone or tablet and get all of the functionality of the OPAC in the palm of your hand.

So why is it that LEAP, a Polaris initiative to make their OPAC responsive, and BLUEcloud, a Sirsi initiative to make certain aspects of their system available via a cloud based application, even making the evening news? I think this is a theme of open source projects around the world, where users and developers of the project chose not to promote certain features of the system because we take it for granted that they should just “be”. At the least, this is a big eye opener for ByWater to the fact that standard features our customers have access todo not necessarily exist in other systems that cost twice as much (or more) than Koha. It is for this reason that we will be putting out a series of blog posts titled “Koha Can Do It!”, many times accompanied by a video for your viewing pleasure!

Stay Tuned!