micro librarian costs

[timbo343]

I had an email stating the following.

 

A secondary has been paying £620 + VAT pa for the maintenance but have been told that this system is no longer supported and they will have to upgrade at a cost of £4,500 (minimum) ... maintenance will continue at around £700pa.

 

I was wondering if anyone else has been told this? Is this a trick from Capita?

[Colindean2000]

We've just had our renewal and it was something like the £620, no mention of the higher cost option...

[3s-gtech]

Perhaps that's the upgrade cost from Eclipse2 to Eclipse.NET including engineer time? It's a very easy upgrade to do for any tech though (if I can do it, anyone can). That'd be an extreme cost for that job though.

[Sylv3r]

They are trying to push schools to the cloud version if your using the self hosted - i've resisted up to now as the product does everything we need and works OK. I imagine eventually our hands will be forced.

[dry]

If it's Junior Librarian you're talking about, then yes they're charging an astronomical amount to upgrade to the cloud version.

 

I've resisted so far, as it's such a high amount for not many useful (to us) features. Our librarian is happy with what she's got.

 

MLS are happy to keep taking a license fee from us every year for the non-cloud version and I don't see us changing in the near future.

[psydii]

They are trying to push schools to the cloud version if your using the self hosted - i've resisted up to now as the product does everything we need and works OK. I imagine eventually our hands will be forced.

 

Until providers that lock all our work up in cloud hosted proprietary databases convince me that we can easily migrate *all* the information recorded therein to competitors, if it isn't on-prem we ain't budging.

 

MLS seem to have a policy of providing insufficient information to set up and maintain their systems on-prem. Occasionally we get through to someone who knows how it works and they 'roll their eyes' and give us the secret source to fix issues, which is great when it happens. It wouldn't be hard for them to tool up their first line with the correct information. To me, this 'failure' is a cynical attempt to drive us to their cloud product. Any price hike now will just drive us look to the competition.

[timbo343]

Im not sure what version the school in question is running but we arent moving to the hosted version unless we are forced. The 24 hour response time doesnt fill me with much confidence. We've had to restore a couple of backups due to start of year import, if we were hosted surely we wouldnt be able to do this.

[synaesthesia]

MLS have not improved in recent years and it looks like they may be trying to force hands - a couple of my primaries have suddenly asked about renewals and moving to the cloud version.

"Only if you have absolutely no other option, which you do" is my default answer.

[3s-gtech]

My experience recently has been good. Wanted to upgrade from version 12 to 15 (a big jump) and contacted them for the installer. Slight issues getting the new site to run, their support got me through it within the day. No push to cloud at all while doing so. Apparently they're moving to a non-Silverlight (yay) version in the Autumn.

[bennz]

The barge pole idiom comes to mind when thinking about any new version of MLS software.

 

The support team are great but the software is not worth the cost or the hassle of bugs/ lack of reporting.

 

Library is much happy since we returned to Junior3.

[PotNoodleTech]

Yeh we kinda said to them - thanks but no thanks, tarra!!!!