Hi all,

 

First of all a quick thanks to everyone who came along to Tuesday’s virtual user group meeting, it was lovely to speak with all of you.

 

I wanted to send around a quick summary of actions agreed, for those who weren’t able to join us:

 

1. We’ve agreed to arrange more virtual meetings, aiming to schedule one every 2^nd month.  I’m checking with Axiell if they’re happy to help with Zoom hosting for future calls, but based on the above we’ll look to schedule another meeting in late November.

 

2. There was some concern in the meeting that communication across the user group was becoming fragmented between the Yammer community platform and the Jiscmail list.  As a number of us aren’t able to access Yammer for various technical reasons, we agreed it would be best to keep important group communications going via this Jiscmail list.  Of course that doesn’t preclude members of the group from posting on Yammer as well (I’d actively encourage that you do, seeing as members of the wider Axiell community are also on Yammer), but I think it’s really important that the majority of user group communications goes through a mechanism that everyone can access.  I’ve also asked Axiell if there’s likely to be a solution to the Yammer access issues in the future, but I understand it isn’t likely to be resolvable in the short/medium term.

 

3. Some concerns were also raised about Axiell’s responsiveness to requests for more information about upgrading to Collections.  Tom and I are raising this as an issue with Axiell, seeing as it also came up in several survey responses as well.  We’re also highlighting potential difficulties for customers who need to make internal bids in their organisation’s annual budget planning cycles.  Some attendees were concerned that if they were unsuccessful in an 2022/23 budget bid, that may leave them with a challenging timetable to upgrade to Collections before January 2024.

 

4. At the start of the meeting I gave a high level overview of the survey results.  Here’s a link to the slides from yesterday, plus the full anonymised survey results: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vKA2vnvYU25pwi_IhoWJ9G9hIGqXL3le.

Feel free to take a look, and thanks again to everyone who filled out the survey - your comments and feedback will be invaluable.

 

5. Last but by no means least – Tom let everyone know that he will be standing down as co-chair of the user group after the meeting as he is leaving IWM.  I’d like to be the first to thank him for all the years he’s put into the Adlib user community, not least for his incredible knowledge of Adlib Designer and writing adapl.  His skills and expertise will definitely be missed!  I’m happy to continue on as chair of the user group, but I’d be more than happy to co-chair if anyone wants to consider volunteering.  One thing that came through in the survey was the desire to ensure the user group is reflective of the full diversity of Adlib customers – in terms of collection types, size of collections, degree of system customisation, and geographical location.  So I’d be particularly keen to hear ideas from people on ways we could achieve that.  Even if you don’t have the time to help chair the group, just sharing your own experiences with the community can help us achieve that – you don’t have to be an Adlib / Collections expert!

 

Wishing you all the best,

Rob

 

Rob Scott | Collections Systems Manager

BFI | 21 Stephen Street | London W1T 1LN

+44 (0)20 7957 4819| [log in to unmask] | bfi.org.uk