Dotland Underground

(To avoid possible legal problems, the name of a certain library automation program has been redacted in this post.)
Silver says the Lime Green Knight reminds of her of Lucille Ball in the chocolate-covered cherry factory, madly stuffing chocolate-covered cherries down her bra, to avoid being detected as not quite ept. He's been frantically stuffing bad news about {beep} in every possible orifice. Now he's been taken off the {beep} assembly line. According to the White Tornado, Lime Green is no longer the Lime Green Project Manager. He's back to the Lime Green Knight. Unfortunately, he left a legacy. The remaining Dots are afraid to post to the listservs (can you say that favorite freedom of the press phrase..."chilling effect"?) Silver has been pretty much forbidden although she has taken the risk of replying to a few posts on the listservs.
The real irony of all this is that {beep} really isn't that bad. There are many things {beep} does really well and only a few pitfalls. Since the Dots are so reluctant to use the listserv, Silver has asked me to pass along some information to the Peasants and Librarians out there.
The two biggest problems with {beep} are the speed (or lack thereof) and the Mojave download. Let's take download first. Currently all students are not being imported every night because {beep} decides, using a very cracked crystal ball, which students need to be imported. In addition, student records don't always match up like they should. Both of these problems require minor changes in the way {beep} is set up. The Dots hope that the {beep} gods will see fit to make those changes soon. In the meantime, how do we cope with this?
1. Delete students very carefully. You might not get them re-imported for weeks.
2. We have duplicate records and cases where the transactions did not follow the student. When a student leaves owing you books, search for him/her in Checkout or Patron Status without the check for Only my patrons. If there are duplicates and your transactions didn't follow the student, print a notice and send it to the librarian at the student's new school, just like we did in the past. This is a problem that will fix itself eventually, hopefully by the end of this year.
3. When you search for students by name in Circulation, you can avoid getting a really long list by changing the Only look in box from All to Last name.

Our second major problem is with the speed of {beep} at some sites. Many sites (Silver thinks, but wasn't allowed to complete her survey) don't find {beep} slow. However, a few sites find it so slow as to be completely non-functional. This is probably a problem with Duchy networks, not {beep} itself, which means it's going to be difficult to solve and might require the application of political pressure to encourage the Duchy to fix it. You definitely need to put in a workorder with TiS but it's probably also a good idea to let the White Tornado know about it. After all the White Tornado moves so fast she can't even see things as slow as {beep} can be at some sites.

There. Silver says she feels so much better having gotten this off her chest.