CODI 2007 Conference, Pittsburgh, PA
Symphony is crap
Our new director agreed to merge our Horizon system into an existing Symphony system. We have been live for a week now, and from what I have seen Symphony is a big step backwards.. Yep, Vista Equity partners definitely maximized their profits by extending the life cycle of the lesser of two products.
Ease of use just doesn't exist in Symphony like it did in Horizon. What only took a click or two in Horizon involves opening and closing several windows. As for closing windows, you have to click on the little x in the corner because the escape key doesn't act as a close window function.
Part of the problem is also that our director didn't push any to actually get any of the staff trained on the system before we switched over. We have also lost any true access to our data, no one on staff has any real permissions or training to try to pull reports or manipulate data.
Community resources is also a nightmare. SD has decided to "standardize" the comm resources data, so they have mapped all the marc records from the 900 fields where into "proper" marc format... title in the 245, abstracts to the 500 etc... And all the data has been set to a Community Info library, so if someone wants to search the newspaper index, they have to either specify Community Info as the library to search, or search all libraries. In my opinion, they should have left everthing in the 900 fields, and built Community Info indexes to search the data..
Then there is Serials... While predictions in Horizon were comparable to Sudoku, the predictions could be elegant. In Symphony, it is a one size fits everything approach. You can set up daily, weekly, monthlys, and such, but, exceptions are not allowed. Combined issues cannot be predicted, it is left up to the person checking in the item to go through multiple steps to combine..
More later... the fun is just beginning
Ease of use just doesn't exist in Symphony like it did in Horizon. What only took a click or two in Horizon involves opening and closing several windows. As for closing windows, you have to click on the little x in the corner because the escape key doesn't act as a close window function.
Part of the problem is also that our director didn't push any to actually get any of the staff trained on the system before we switched over. We have also lost any true access to our data, no one on staff has any real permissions or training to try to pull reports or manipulate data.
Community resources is also a nightmare. SD has decided to "standardize" the comm resources data, so they have mapped all the marc records from the 900 fields where into "proper" marc format... title in the 245, abstracts to the 500 etc... And all the data has been set to a Community Info library, so if someone wants to search the newspaper index, they have to either specify Community Info as the library to search, or search all libraries. In my opinion, they should have left everthing in the 900 fields, and built Community Info indexes to search the data..
Then there is Serials... While predictions in Horizon were comparable to Sudoku, the predictions could be elegant. In Symphony, it is a one size fits everything approach. You can set up daily, weekly, monthlys, and such, but, exceptions are not allowed. Combined issues cannot be predicted, it is left up to the person checking in the item to go through multiple steps to combine..
More later... the fun is just beginning
Add a Comment
© 2009 Created by Amy Terlaga on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
You need to be a member of CODI 2007 to add comments!
Join this Ning Network