Library Technology Guides

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Statistical Report for Sierra

2 Responses for Sierra in 2011

0 Responses for Sierra in 2010

0 Responses for Sierra in 2009

0 Responses for Sierra in 2008

0 Responses for Sierra in 2007

2022 : gen: 6.14 company 5.77 loyalty 5.61 support 6.02

2021 : gen: 6.22 company 5.99 loyalty 5.63 support 6.17

2020 : gen: 6.17 company 5.75 loyalty 5.51 support 5.93

2019 : gen: 5.92 company 5.34 loyalty 5.22 support 5.26

2018 : gen: 6.09 company 5.45 loyalty 5.23 support 5.17

2017 : gen: 6.27 company 5.42 loyalty 5.36 support 5.30

2016 : gen: 6.23 company 5.54 loyalty 5.52 support 5.26

2015 : gen: 6.18 company 5.45 loyalty 5.40 support 5.17

2014 : gen: 5.90 company 5.48 loyalty 5.52 support 5.32

2013 : gen: 6.54 company 6.34 loyalty 6.36 support 6.11

2012 : gen: 6.87 company 7.08 loyalty 7.22 support 7.04

Comments

This vendor has outsourced some of its customer support overseas. Sometimes it can be difficult to communicate with staff in the overseas support office. We've seen a degradation in customer service at the help desk--slowness to respond to calls, outsourced customer support. When we started with this company 10 years ago we were very satisfied with the help desk staff. It's not just slowness in answering calls or resolving issues, it's that the personal contact is diminished. Long term employees have recently left the company. (Type: Academic)

The culture of III does seem to be changing under the new venture capital ownership. It may be the issues arising from trying to digest two newly acquired ILS's, but the help desk and product development seem stuck in place since early 2013, while the PR from the company has improved a lot. I think we're all holding our breath, waiting to see what will happen. (Definitely don't want to change ILS without much bigger issues, we probably have the most full featured one available.) (Type: Consortium)

We believe that since III was sold from being a privately owned company to a privately held company (Venture capitalist) there have been a noticeable change in support structure and delivery. III seems to have lost it's 'mojo' as what librarians want and need. There aren't too many librarians who are true analysts at III. The support asks very basic questions as if they've never seen an ILS before. The software (Sierra) is not an improvement over Millennium. We've stepped back in time at least 5 years. It is not an improvement and I'm sorry we bought the product and migrated. (Type: Academic)

Their customer service and communication has declined significantly. Recently we purchased a product. It is now 5 months later and it is still not working. We have no idea why. We keep asking and we keep being told nothing--they are working on it. This is one of many examples. (Type: Public)

costs aspects should be a radio factor button choice. For an ILS vendor III et al this is the time they should be giving/throwing all the ILS products into the SAME ILS pot to make the best ILS with the design to keep current customers for ever. Our ILS is OK but it is expensive. Add the costs of 1 year, 5 years, 10 years.... and why are we all not moving to open source? Of Sierra -it is still just a tan millennium. We hitting 1.5 years w/Sierra; only just now are we getting stablized after many breaks. Beyond the fixes there has been very little NEW change in Sierra since we went. (Type: Academic)

This year we merged our ILS with those of our sister colleges [...] . We have a longstanding consortial arrangement with them and have developed strong ties between the library staffs. Our new shared Sierra system is hosted at [...] College. (Type: Academic)

The Sierra system is still in the implementation stage after three months and many of the possible features have not been locally implemented. (Type: Academic)

Migration to Sierra from Millennium was seamless on the end user side. Training was excellent (Type: Academic)

When we purchased Sierra in 2012 (were on Millennium), we were told explicitly that the Sierra/OverDrive API (in development) would be available for our WebPAC. No mention made of having to have Encore. I continue to ask when that will be available, is it only Encore and continue to be told it's coming soon for WebPAC. I've been asking almost two years now. Really disappointed/feel cheated. Sometimes it seems like all III cares about is making press announcements and then telling customers that they have to now pay extra for services that should be standard. (Type: Public)

We are very satisfied with our current system. We just upgrade to Sierra this past year and had no problems. (Type: Public)

Move to Sierra from Millennium has been reasonably smooth. Only a few issues with our RFID 3M products interfacing properly with the Sierra Desktop client. [..] Thanks for your great work, Marshall! (Type: Public)

We haven't been happy with Sierra although it has a lot of potential. I hope the company will put the resources into the system so they can make it the system they plan. It has gotten quite a bit better during the past year but still has a long way to go. A good discover system will help improve they system in a big way. (Type: Academic)

The sale of the company to a larger corporation is being felt in reduced access to dedicated customer service, and reduced responsiveness to customer requests. We have tickets that have been outstanding for years, and have had some closed without notice and without resolution. We have frequent complaints from faculty members frustrated by the lack of availability of robust index searching and index-based displays. The reliance on relevancy ranking as the solely available display for most search results is not appropriate for academic libraries. We are generally very frustrated with the company as a whole currently, but are still hard-pressed to see better, more complete service options on the market. (Type: Academic)

Company has invoiced us 3 times for an invoice that we already paid for. Doesn't give us much confidence. Support always refer to documentation, but the answer isn't in the documentation, which is horrible. Support only tells us some things after we repeatedly ask them. (Type: Consortium)

We are still running Classic Dynix and are working on implementing Sierra/Encore. We are not yet live on Sierra, and the Discovery product, Encore. We were very satisfied with Dynix, but were instructed by our IT department that we would have to either upgrade or move to another system as the servers on campus were no longer being supported. (Type: Academic)

System performance has been slow once we began being hosted by the vendor. (Type: Academic)

[...] uses additional peripheral systems, being: SFX Link resolver from Ex Libris Content Pro content management system from III SAPnet acquisitions support system (South Africa based) (Type: Academic)

The Sierra product has been riddled with issues - slowness being a huge one. customer service has been pretty non-existent. We formed a new consortium and all of us recently signed with Sirsi-Dynix after also looking at Polaris and Agent Verso. We liked the Polaris product, but didn't go with it because during our evaluation it was purchased by Innovative. (Type: Public)

We are not satisfied with Sierra. It has extreme latency issues that are attributed to "high demand" items. While high demand items to cause latency when looking up records, they aren't the only records that experience latency. (Type: Public)

Four months with Innovative have been a severe disappointment. The hosting service is slow. A botched database change which wiped out the university Encore catalog for a week. With Decision Center still to be implemented, the basic reports are not adequate. Support that appears to be disorganized. Staff come and go, including the migration manager in mid-migration. (Type: Academic)

Having dealt with 5 automation vendors in my career, I.I.I. is by far the worst in terms of promising functionality that it knew it didn't possess and steadfastly refuses to add into the software as enhancements. The software is useless for a multi-type cooperative since Sierra assumes 'one big happy collection of materials' that can be used by all. (Type: Public)

Dissatisfaction with inflexible discovery system will lead to a migration to open source offering in coming year. (Type: Law)

We just went live on October 15 so we are still discovering how it works and what needs we have. (Type: Public)

Sierra's "next-generation" claims, in truth, amount to too little real change at too high a price. The web-based interface (the Dashboard) is still vestigial years after launch, and the java-based architecture is less responsive and more resource intensive than Millennium. The only benefits we have actually realized over Millennium are PostGRES database access (which we don't use a lot) and the streamlining of login processes. For this, we lost access to a significant number of tools available from *outside* the client (in a Telnet window) and we lost significant performance speed, particularly in the area of batch processes. (Type: Academic)

Our choice of ILS is largely dictated by our consortium ([...])'s. (Type: Academic)

Recent acquisitions of other ILS vendors, and subsequent layoffs of veteran product managers, has me a bit concerned. Otherwise, Innovative's product is still a sound investment. (Type: Consortium)

We would consider an open source ILS and spent considerable time several years ago looking at Evergreen. At the time, Evergreen just didn't have the functionality that a consortium of our size requires (Type: Consortium)

We are stuck using Innovative because we are part of a larger consortium that uses it for collection sharing. So we feel little power to change your ILS despite the poor customer service. (Type: Academic)

We migrated from III Millennium to III Sierra this year. It was a very smooth migration. The newer software has added functionality in several key areas. We are adding the III Decision Center and the III Materials Booking products this fall, with target dates for use by next spring. (Type: Academic)

Help desk response has improved in the last 3-4 months. MUCH better. (Type: Academic)

I was not a party to the investigation into specific vendors. (Type: Public)

We were very impressed by the Open Source option (Koha) but the lack of an integrated ERM system swayed our choice. If it had been a truly integrated system, the outcome may have been different. (Type: Academic)

The current system appears to be one or two generations behind what the future promises. It is extremely costly, and requires between 1.5 and 2 FTE to keep it going. (Type: Academic)

ProQuest has made many changes in their support site this year. They continue to have one of the best support services we have used. I think overall, the quality of their databases is often underestimated. (Type: Academic)

Looking ahead we are interested in a system that would enable us to track use of library resources by students and correlate it with student learning outcome data in other systems. (Type: Academic)

Moving to Sierra was a good transition. The support during our transition was great. Innovative support is still spotty. Sometimes questions get answered right away. Sometimes tickets get ignored for weeks. Bit frustrating. (Type: Academic)

Over the past year we have experienced two data losses, both due to carelessness and poor communication on the part of the vendor. One of the losses was quite small, but the other was significant and as of yet we have not been able to obtain accurate information about how much data was affected. At this point we have no confidence whatsoever in the integrity of our data. We are pleased with much of the functionality offered by our ILS, but are deeply concerned about the technical support performance of the vendor. (Type: Academic)

We are very concerned with the change in Innovative Interfaces. They seemed to have lost their focus. Not sure if they have expanded too quickly, taken on too many large customers or acquired too many other companies. Rumors are flying that they are trying to make company look profitable so they can sell it. They have definitely fallen down on customer service. Plus their sales promises do not match up to actuality. Huge disappointment (Type: Public)

Collection number includes digital materials. (Type: Public)

We are still learning so much about the new system that our impressions of functionality may be a limitation of our knowledge. (Type: Public)

While we are not fully satisfied with our ILS, we have not seen any others that give the complete range of services either. Also, our ILS is tied into our consortium in such a way that we can only switch if the whole consortium does. This makes it a difficult move. (Type: Academic)

Sierra does not live up to its marketing. It does not yet have useful APIs except for the SQL API. It does not have good support for e-books. Its ERM needs improvement, but it seems to be a static product. It does not interface easily with accounting systems. (Type: Academic)

Migrating from Millennium to Sierra has provided few, if any, benefits, and in many ways has proved problematic. (Type: Government Agency)

iii pricing policies are atrocious. The training is not only expensive (there is almost NO free training), but the actual training is hit or miss. (Some trainers are very good and some are not knowledgeable about the system), The system documentation needs to be greatly improved, especially in the areas of system architecture and processes. Support staff isn't always knowledgeable about the product, and it takes too long to get some tickets addressed. (Type: Public)

Not actively investigating open source ILS but we are investigating open source discovery such as Blacklight & VuFind. Looking for a way to bring together all information resources of our institution. (Type: Academic)

[...] is part of the [...] libraries. ILS is provided by the consortium, which recently migrated to Sierra. (Type: Public)

III has been wonderful to work with. The product works well with any operating system. We have a mix of Macs and PCs. We use IPADS as well. (Type: Public)

The general perception is that III has expanded too far too fast. While there are more people providing customer service, requests for support submitted via the ticketing system often drop through the cracks. (Type: Academic)

We might consider implementing an open source discovery layer. The list of unresolved known issues at Innovative has grown recently. Both customer service responsiveness and development have lagged, and the company has been hurt by staff defections, at the same time that existing customers are being nickled and dimed on add-on services. We are generally satisfied with Sierra as a replacement for Millennium, but frustrated that Sierra bug fixes and enhancements have stalled. It will be interesting to see if the acquisition of VTLS/Virtua will boost development of the far weaker Sierra OPAC (Webpac Pro), or if this will just be a case of suppressing a superior product from the market. (Type: Law)

We are currently committed to using III products through our Consortium. We usually do not deal directly with III, as all support requests go through the Consortium Central Office. We are relatively satisfied with III, but they are slow to make changes that assist consortia. We rarely have any of our product suggestions implemented into their product. (Type: Academic)

Lack of a functional inventory system and mobile circ module has been very disappointing. Support is hit and miss. Many assumptions are made by the vendor without a realistic understanding about what an ILS should provide for a consortium. (Type: Consortium)

We don't have an ERM, and Primo and SFX don't talk with Sierra. There isn't an ERM product that would be interoperative with the other systems we've chosen. At the moment, Alma is the only library services platform that is developed enough for us to consider. WMS has very elegant theory behind it, but the application isn't quite all there yet. InTota is still vaporware. Innovative Interfaces is calling Sierra a library services platform, but we don't think it is, and we are very tired of paying a la carte for every new product, especially new products that replace existing functionality we already paid for. We are playing wait and see and hoping that one of the new systems will be acceptable to us before our current servers reach end of life. (Type: Academic)

We are currently a turnkey system and will remain that way as long as possible. We are not comfortable putting our patron information into the cloud and are skeptical of Innovative's recent track record for ISP hosting. (Type: Public)

Migration/go live occurring Fall 2014. Almost there, a bit rough in places. Looking forward to the next one in three years. (Type: Academic)

Innovative drastically over-promised and under-delivered. Tech support is completely unhelpful and communication between vendor and client and between departments at the vendor is abysmal. Our server is hosted by Innovative and we have daily issues with connectivity. Basic functions, such as searching the collection of a single library or preventing inter-library holds on new materials, are either non-existent or so cumbersome to execute they may as well be non-existent. 5 months after migration, our libraries are feeling like we made a big mistake. (Type: Public)

Certainly hasn't proven to be the "Cadillac" of ILSs! (Type: Public)

Innovative promised to make our consortium's system holds work the same way they did when we were with SirsiDynix, but they don't, and it's caused huge workflow problems and, I believe, a decrease in circulation. We've had horrible response time issues with our remotely-hosted system (hosted at one of Innovative's server farms), bringing our library to a halt multiple times per day/week. We can't scope our local library catalogs properly, which is frustrating and confusing to our patrons (and Innovative wants to charge each library thousands of dollars per year to do something that SirsiDynix could do with no problem, for free). I could go on and on with the complaints. I would not recommend Innovative to any library or consortium. (Type: Public)

novative Interface Inc. has been very difficult to work with and the product Sierra and Encore are terrible. The functionality is not great. Everything is an extra cost and many of the services that were offered in the prior ILS that should be a standard in a library catalog are gone such as being able to default all searches to the owning library. The customer service has been horrendous and I would not recommend this vendor to anyone. I would like to add that the consortium that handles our ILS is not as well versed as they should be in dealing with all of the problems. They are quick to tell us that the problem is local and not their problem or Innovative's problem when that is not the case. The past two weeks have been so bad with just connectivity issues that the type of service we are offering our patrons is embarrassing. It is hard to do your job when the product doesn’t work. (Type: Public)

I am shocked and frustrated by the quality of service that Innovative has demonstrated. They sold us a product that is inferior to Sirsi Dynix. Our patrons are not happy and complain often. At this time, (October & November 2014) we are finding the response time is quite slow - embarrassingly so. We all wish we had not migrated to iii. (Type: Public)

Since the contracts were signed, this company seems to have taken a laissez-faire attitude toward the consortium. It has been a struggle and has worsened in the past few weeks. (Type: Public)

I am very disappointed that what we were shown in demos is NOTHING like what we were given. We were promised the moon but they delivered the dust. It seems like they accepted too many new customers without making sure they could handle it all first. (Type: Public)

Integrated interfaces sold us a system with promises of many features that we have not seen. We have had serious response time issues that are not in compliance with the contract specifications. The transition was very chaotic as many of the workings of the system were not made known to staff and customer service apparently did not understand how some things work. The Online catalog has been a major disappointment. This was implemented about 5 months ago. (Type: Public)

The migration to Sierra was intended to be an improvement in service to the public. It has proved to be nothing but a problem to staff and patrons. Everyone is at their wit's end. Our previous ILS was Sirsi Dynix and we long for the good old days. (Type: Public)

We are new customers to III. As a member of a consortium, I would encourage to any consortia who are considering making the switch to III to consider their decision carefully. Some things I like, but I think the system would work best in a multi-branch situation, not a consortium that has different policies etc. Also, system speed (lack thereof) is a major downer. (Type: Public)

We went live this May and we have been very disappointed. We have several issues related to our RFP that have not been addressed and have caused a high degree of friction for the members of our consortium. Help desk calls from the consortium to III languish for weeks or months when their own standards call for twoo-day resolution. We are at the end of three weeks of ongoing, scattered slowdowns that have brought many consortium members' transactions to a halt--serious responses from III only began in the past week. As our consortium chief executive said, "Issues are responded to with platitudes or referrals to higher-ups who never respond." As a member of the RFP task force which recommended this ILS, I feel embarrassed that our hard work and due diligence came to nothing and that we were lied to. (Type: Public)

We have spent most of the year on SirsiDynix's Horizon and just recently finished migrating to III's Sierra product.

III makes a big deal about how "open" their system is touting a PostgreSQL database but Horizon is leagues better in that regard than Sierra. Sierra only officially provides read-only access to specially created views. There is not even read-only access to the base tables. It's unclear at this time how complete the coverage of the views are but it certainly is less access than Horizon provides. There are also apparently various other smaller MySQL databases that some components use. We don't have access to those at all.

The database structure does not always conform to what I would expect from a relational database. I'm hoping this is a hold-over from Millennium and will gradually be rectified as updates are released. I feel that some of the major flaws are probably there to provide a better upgrade path for Millennium libraries to Sierra but it cripples those of us who came from a real relational database structure.

III's migration process seems drawn out. I did not go through our Dynix to Horizon migration but my understanding is that, aside from extensive prep work, it was done in a couple of days. III's process is a phased migration. First you migrate cataloging (which takes 1-2 weeks), then acquisitions (and possibly serials), then you wait a couple of weeks, migrate patron records, then another week or so and migrate circ/blocks/fines/messages. This requires weird work-arounds to keep all services up for patrons.

That being said, I was very happy with our data profiler who did an excellent job and was very responsive to changes we requested. While most of our implementation team was fairly responsive, our Encore team was terrible. Simple issues took 4-6 weeks to address. Spell check was inoperable for 2 weeks due to an index that apparently needed to be restarted (which of course we didn't have access to). I've never had this much trouble communicating with other tech people before.

Our trainers were pretty good and very willing to work with us. I felt III should have done a better job of separating out "settings" from "training" but in the end it mostly worked out.

Go-live went relatively well. Most issues were fairly minor. However, we do have one system that is non-functional and support doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it. Unfortunately, this is a very publicly obvious system and we're scrambling to put work-arounds in place.

TELEFORM:

Everyone I've talked to that used Talking Tech's automated phone system agrees that III's Teleforms system is awful. It's buggy and runs on a consumer grade OS as an application rather than a service. Hopefully they can get it replaced with a different system/vendor soon.

CORPORATE CULTURE:

III has a one right way of doing things and seems to have trouble thinking outside their proprietary box. Given we also have definite ideas about the right way to do things, this has provided some interesting discussions.

THE GOOD:

All that being said, there are some definite pluses to the product over Horizon. The copy/paste abilities are amazing. Sounds small but saves a significant amount of time as does the ability to reorder the columns. Create lists/Global Update is very powerful. Much, much more powerful than the non-SQL tools Horizon provided. Given they are so powerful, there's also a large opportunity for mistakes to be made.

ENCORE:

The One-click checkout of Overdrive materials from Encore is fantastic. We're also pleased so far with the relevancy rankings. We had some long discussions with III to get the filters working the way we wanted but now we're quite happy with them. One filter I would like, which is currently not available, is the ability to limit to "on order" items. Also, we hope that III will continue to migrate functionality from their classic catalog to Encore. Specifically, we'd like the ability for patrons to setup preferred searches in Encore as we don't give them direct access to the classic catalog. Encore's base customization is pretty limited but with the newest version the custom header provides the option to use jquery and change a lot more of the look.

WOULD WE DO IT AGAIN?

Probably, though in hindsight I would have advocated for a tighter contract with more details regarding appropriate response time from support as well as complete access to all systems. We're still at the beginning of our relationship with III. I expect with more time we will learn how to work together better and will learn the best way to exploit the system to its full potential.

(Type: Public)

We recently joined [...] consortium and moved from Millenium to Sierra. Innovative made many promises in our contract, most related to the functionality of Encore to meet our needs. They have not lived up to their promises making lots of Library Directors very, very unhappy. (Type: Public)

The Sierra ILS has provided major improvements in functionality for our library over the previous ILS. We are on the whole very happy with the current system. The only exception is in the area of acquisitions, which could use improvement. (Type: Public)

We are hosted and have had a fair amount of trouble with it. We just went through a 2 week period where we experienced downtime or very noticeable downtime. Less than a year ago we needed to reconfigure our system and have downtime because the hosted site was relocated. Overall I do think the support has gotten much more responsive since we went to Sierra and infinitely better than what we had on Sirsi Symphony. Overall, I feel confident in the future of III as they continue the transition away from Jerry Kline. Many more support staff have been hired and projects are being more professionally with best practices. (Type: Public)

Innovative is going through so many corporate changes that there has definitely been a loss of institutional memory and support staff who are familiar with old and complex systems such as ours. Several important modules have seen product manager changes in the last year - some more than once, This is worrisome. On the other hand, the support desk is definitely striving for faster turnaround and, with a new support desks in Europe, we can often get a faster response to our queries. (Type: Academic)

Sierra is a very nice and powerful ILS, but development of the product and promised enhanced features are very far behind schedule. Since Innovative sold out to venture capitalists, support has gotten increasingly worse. Hard to justify the high cost of staying with Innovative; we will most likely be moving to another ILS this year. (Type: Academic)

Their tech support had diminished over the past year. We have an open ticket for a product installation and it has been difficult at best to reach a resolution. When they find one, the resolution breaks a different part of the system. Once the call was escalated, we have been receiving more updates on what is happening, though no in depth details. (Type: Consortium)

When we implemented Sierra, we were told that it would have all the functionality of Millennium. As to date, it still does not have all the functionality. (Type: Academic)

Our system is a shared catalog with twenty or so other colleges in [...]. Anything we do would be done in conjunction with the people who manage the system for us. Working within the consortia keeps our costs and our staff time to a minimum which is why we stay in the group. (Type: Academic)

It is very clunky to load and maintain subscription products within the ILS (e.g. ebook packages). Also, I feel interface upgrades, such as Encore for Sierra/Millenium, ought to be provided free of charge rather than paying for the upgrade. I feel that we are paying quite a lot yet the catalog interface is very dated and we cannot even get faceted browsing without upgrading/paying for Encore. (Type: Academic)

Our library consortium purchases our ILS system, so if we move to a new ILS, it will be done on the consortium level. While Sierra does a lot of things well, there are things that could be improved when it comes to Encore and patron access to our collections. If Encore would implement more "Bibliocommons" type functionality, we would be very pleased. (Type: Public)

Customer support and documentation poor. (Type: Public)

Our Sierra implementation was very onerous and problem-ridden. (Type: Public)

We like Innovative not happy with Sierra--functionality not as good as their Millennium product. (Type: Academic)

We implemented the III Sierra system in order to join the [...] consortium. If we were ever to leave [...] I would be looking at open source systems for our small library collection. (Type: Academic)

We launched the new stand alone system in May 2014 and we had some issues with the original installation which has since been rectified. (Type: Public)

Innovative does seem to have a great vision for their product, but it's hard to get excited about the vision of a product when you can't even reliably launch the client, and the help desk lets your ticket stagnate for months. We are extraordinarily disappointed with Sierra, and have had one of the worst customer support experiences imaginable with them. Our decision to migrate to Sierra has been devastating for our system. Right now we just want an ILS that works, forget about all the (Type: Public)

We really don't have any contact with customer support at our library level - it is all done through [...] Service. (Type: Public)

Sierra is largely a good product; however iii's needs to rethink some of the business logic that they moved from the flat file systems to relational databases. I loath to see the acquisition of more ILS vendors by equity investment groups. They care only about recurring revenue, and development is too low a priority. Subsequently, patrons have less reason to come to the library for content. Patrons' interests will continue to shift to relatively inexpensive, fee-based products for the convenience they offer. Equity investment in library products is bad news. (Type: Public)

Sierra has been in place in this library since early June 2014. (Type: Public)

We may implement WorldCat Discovery to improve discovery for our licensed electronic content (right now only JSTOR and AHL on EBSCO). The in house discovery platform is for our museum collections and locally digitized resources. A subset of our institution's holdings (with just a few resources from our library) were contributed to DPLA in October 2014. (Type: Museum)

Sierra was installed in this library since early June 2014. (Type: Public)

Innovative's customer support seems to be more responsive. Its worldwide organization adds to some follow up challenges. Calls are best opened via email and followed up by phone. Tech support staff seem to be working under a more aggressive company expectation to resolve issues quickly. Sierra's standard reporting features are inherited from Millennium and have not been updated. Rather, an additional cost reporting product has been developed. We stopped using the ILL and Reserves modules years ago and are currently considering replacing WAM with EZproxy. WorldCat Local tech support has been less than acceptable due to apparent new staff, inadequate communication internally, long times to resolve critical problems. This is a large part of our motivation to move to Summon for our discovery tool. (Type: Academic)

We were investigating open source but decided to continue with Innovative. (Type: Public)

The discovery layer Encore Duet (III and EDS from Ebsco) is not as good as it could be. EDS on its own may be more satisfactory, Library is part of consortium and so we compromise! The look and feel of the discovery layer Encore Duet is out of date. Still many problems integrating electronic resources into the III Sierra. This is the reason for the Encore Duet discovery interface, as most of the electronic resources knowledge base resides in the Ebsco Linksource/AtoZ List and not in III Sierra. Implementation of the interface was time-consuming and difficult. Ebsco provided a dedicated person to help set up the EDS portion of Encore Duet for each library in the [..] consortium. On the other hand working with the III Encore production manager was much more hit and miss, plus they had a change of manager during the process. Although the EDS was much more customizable for each library, the Encore side was customized by consortium-wide decisions and also with the Encore production cycle (6 months I think). A very unsatisfactory hybrid solution -- not recommended by me. (Type: Academic)

We are very happy with our system. (Type: Public)

We pretty much run everything having to do with the ILS through the consortium, [...] , so they'd be better at answering how satisfying the ILS customer service and support is. (Type: Public)

Please note that we have contracted for a hosted Sierra solution but we have not implemented Sierra at our library. This is due to firewall issues raised by our IT Security Dept. They will not open the necessary ports to connect to our hosted Sierra server. We do not have the resources to host the server in-house and we cannot proceed with opening firewall ports. The next system we purchase will need to use an HTML thin client (Type: Law)

[...] (Type: )

On the question about whether we would consider working with the same vendor in the future, this was more difficult to answer on the scale. We've had a lot of issues with promises made by Innovative about Sierra, which were not upheld. Innovative also has some troublesome ideas about costs for innovation (charging for APIs for instance) and their pricing structures are problematic. Plus we're in discussions for a consortial system, so we hope to make choices based on what the consortia decides. (Type: Academic)

Since the change over to venture capital cpmpany's, III has bceome very unstable. A lot of experienced staff have left the company. It put a lot of toll specially to the Middle East customers. On top of that III is working with a local distributor who is also selling SirsiDynix product. We are resisting to work with the local distributor as they are not good at all. Since the purchase of VTLS and Polaris, we can see the delay in development work in Sierra and Encore. The same scenario I have see with SirsiDynix years ago when they been through the same situation. (Type: National)

Satisfaction with the ILS has been dented by the number of new bugs introduced by Sierra bug-fix updates. The focus on bug fixes has made development of Sierra much slower than Innovative led us to believe it would be (not that we suspect they were lying to us - they wouldn't have expected so many bugs themselves). Customer service overall has been improved by the introduction of Library Relations Managers - ours has been very effective. (Type: Academic)

This is a new implementation of the Sierra system (migrating from Berytos). Migration complete: September 2014. (Type: Academic)

Sierra took two years to deliver the product. At a sales meeting 2 years ago, the salespeople could not get the demo to work. I am disappointed that the same system that allows for Hold and Inter-library loans cannot track the data. In any other business field, Sierra would not be in business. (Type: Public)

Choice of ILS is dependent on the consortium to which the library belongs. There have been discussions about a future ILS migration. Any movement in that direction is many years down the road. (Type: Academic)

III has truly terrible customer service and a programming model that went out of fashion in the late 1970s. The way they close access to our own data is frustrating to the point of enraging. It's too bad they bought Polaris - a company with a reputation for good customer service. (Type: Public)

Too many issues in Software Engineering that don't get resolved in a timely fashion Inability to access closed tickets Several instances of system upgrades without notification to consortium staff Inability to perform secondary system refresh on our training server when previously, we could Current ticket system is awkward - needs a subject line, for example The changes in the structure of management in the last 18 months have been positive Beginning of implementation of APIs is a good thing Good communication with our LRM and sales person New releases are stable and have kept the system moving forward (Type: Consortium)

Would like to see improvement of customer services, and clear development goal and product delivery for the next few years. (Type: Academic)

The customer service and software quality at III has really gone downhill. The company has lost or let go of many of their most experienced staff. Every Sierra patch or update within the last year has caused issues with critical functions in the software. It's painfully obvious that they are having a lot of internal issues as they try to absorb Polaris and VTLS and make investors happy. Overall the software gets the job done, but our confidence in the company and the reliability of software updates and support has never been lower. (Type: Public)

Maybe I'm being picky not giving 9s. III has been good about opening up Sierra with APIs that permit, or will permit, much better integration and performance with our VuFind-based discovery layer. We're satisfied with the ILS on the staff side, although we think some things are just inexplicably clunky; the Java clients are way too vulnerable to fluctuations in Internet service. (Type: Public)

Sierra does not seem to live up to the advertised idea that it would be a great improvement over Millennium. It seems that Innovative's choice to stay with an unstable JAVA platform is causing Sierra to suffer from many of the same behaviors that Millennium always did. Updates seldom come without new bugs these days. (Type: Consortium)

Slow or no response to email questions. Expensive maintenance contract. (Type: Academic)

The amount of staff turnover at Innovative since it was bought by its current owners concerns us, as does the company's (related?) inability to deliver on developing functionality it has promised. (Type: Public)

Although we are generally satisfied with Innovative and its products, we are on a separate system from our main library, and there has been considerable pressure on campus for us to migrate to the main library's system, so we are moving in that direction. If/when they decide to migrate or upgrade, we will be part of that decision. (Type: Law)

We had some hopes that things were turning for the better for a brief period at Innovative, but since they have acquired Polaris and VTLS, customer service, enhancements, and product improvements haven't been better. The staff with whom we cultivated good working relationships with are now gone. Development for most products seem to be behind the times. They have swallowed most of the rest of the industry, so there's no other vendor to really turn to unless we pour our own resources into open source. They have a capacity problem and growing pains that have been going on for several years now and it needs to be remedied asap. But I guess it doesn't matter too much since they're the biggest fish in the ILS industry right now. (Type: Public)

We are members of the Marmot consortium, based in [...] and we are quite pleased with their service & expertise. (Type: Public)

Innovative's customer support has been negatively affected by the company's recent changes. They seem to be having a very hard time turning things around. (Type: Public)

EBSCO Discovery has changed over the last two years- not for the better. We have brought our issues to our representative at EBSCO but nothing has changed. He is very concerned but I doubt if the final decision is in his hands. The subject headings they provide are very strange and have nothing to do with what is being searched. They won't incorporate ProQuest, etc. Basically, it's like federated searching. We just had a meeting with Summons and we are really impressed. Hope we sign up with them. Innovative has proved to be a big disappointment. Forget their "Duet" product- the worst. Encore is just so so. We have 5 yr. contract with them. Although our systems librarian very much likes their modules and their ability to be manipulated to create lists, things like that. He really like that. Don't mean to go on- our EBSCO contract will be up in June. Their rep. is meeting with us next week. (Type: Academic)

functionality - expensive for extras, some things doesn't work without a lot of staff time, authorities are not very intuitive managing electronic - cumbersome, public facing side is not intuitive satisfaction with iii - work on openness and forward thinking customer support - very friendly and knowledgeable, willing to help in any way (Type: Academic)

During that last year Innovative Interfaces has undergone major change with the acquisition of Polaris and VTLS. Also there has been great emphasis on expanding to new markets. Unfortunately, less emphasis has been placed on serving existing customers needs. (Type: Academic)

ILS   ABCD ALEPH 500 ALIST AVEKT Abilita Kirjasto Absys AbsysNet Aguapey Alexandria Alma Alto Amlib Apollo Athena Atriuum Aurora Autolibrarian Axiell Aurora BIBLIOFIL BIBSYS ILS BOOK-IT Biblio300 Book Collector Connect Bookmark Brocade CDS/ISIS COBISS CROLIST CS/TextWorks/Genie CaMPI Carl.X Carthame Circulation Plus ClavisNG Cloud Libraries Concerto Concourse Cuadra SKCL MARC Custom Database in MS Access CyberTools for Libraries DDElibra DIGIBIB Destiny Dynix E-Cats Library EOS.Web Evergreen Evergreen -- Alpha G Evergreen -- Equinox Software Evergreen -- Independent Evergreen -- MOBIUS Evergreen -- PTFS Europe Evergreen -- Spruce Evolve Genie Glifos Heritage Heritage CIRQA Horizon ISIS -- Winisis Infocentre Insignia Integrated Tertiary Software Koha Koha -- BibLibre Koha -- ByWater Solutions Koha -- CALYX Koha -- Catalyst Koha -- Cineca Koha -- Equinox Software Koha -- Independent Koha -- Interleaf Technology Koha -- Kobli Koha -- LibLime Koha -- Libriotech Koha -- Mill Run Technologies Koha -- PTFS Europe Koha -- Prosentient Systems Koha -- Xercode Koha -- eScire Kuali OLE LBS Lokaal Bibliotheek Systeem LIMEDIO LISTEN2000 LMSi Libero Liberty Libnet Libra.se Library.Solution LibraryThing LibraryWorld Locally developed MUSAC Library Manager Mandarin Mandarin M3 Mandarin Oasis Mikromarc Millennium Minisis NExpress NewGenLib None OLIB OPALS Open Marco Polo OpenBiblio OpenGalaxy Origo OurLibraryOnline PATRON PC Card Catalog PMB PallasPro Past Perfect Software Polaris Portfolio Presto Cloud for DB/TextWorks PrettyLib Proficio Pérgamo Qulto Readerware Regard ResourceMate SIABUC Sebina OpenLibrary Senayan Library Management System V3 Sierra Sima Camelot Skyblue7 Solars Spydus Surpass SydneyPlus Symphony TMM V-smart VERSO Verbis Virtua Voyager Vubis Smart Winisis Winnebago Spectrum WorldShare Management Services bicatWise eLM

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Library Technology Guides is a service provided by Marshall Breeding, independent consultant, author, and speaker.