OverDrive? Anyone using it

[timbo343]

It would appear that our librarian has subscribed to OverDrive (https://www.overdrive.com/) and now wants me to quickly get it working!

 

Anyone know of this company (based in the US) or is actually using the service?

 

Their documentation is pretty thin on the ground to be fair!

[southhamster]

Pretty much all public libraries use it for borrowing ebooks. I use it on my kobo reader and it's been a godsend in lockdown. There is map of local overdrive organisations including some schools.but I'm on my mobile so can't find it. Maybe contact a few and see if they can help?

Looks like there are a couple of apps which might help

https://www.overdrive.com/

[simpsonj]

We use it for Sora.

 

To be fair, their support people were really helpful. I couldn't get SSO to work with RM Unify, but if you have G-Suite setup it's pretty easy to integrate. Otherwise we just uploaded a .csv with usernames and passwords, and then use the user management portal to make changes.

[David44]

Is anyone still using this?

 

We are paying for it but it seems such a waste of money as students often can't sign in and give up as their is no option for them to reset their password themselves.

@simpsonj Your experience was quite different to ours. I had several emails back and forth simply asking for the format of the CSV file which they couldn't seem to send me, something that should have been on their website anyway. I managed to create a CSV file but only through trial and error and them drip feeding field names as I asked for each one individually. I never did get the actual CSV format from them.

 

We brought it with the intention of students signing in with Google but we run out of time because they are such a frustrating company to deal with. Does it work better with Google integration? Maybe I need to look at that again but typically there seems to be no documentation on their website about this either.

[CTIDTech]

We use it and it works seamlessly (Sora) through our SSO platform ClassLink who have a federated SSO with this company - Uses simply click the app from their launchpad and it signs them in I think using a SAML connection. End result - no sign in issues and students and staff happy. Also, we get full tracking data so we know if it is being used or not, something we did struggle with.

[simpsonj]

Sadly, I don't think we use it anymore, so how I had it setup has joined the mountain of software that I have implemented, managed then completely forgotten about!