First Mistakes

So, we had a last-minute panic. My IT person is now saying that in-house Koha is preferable to hosted (a 180). However, I'm still being told that if it were in-house, he'd want to lock out my vendor from getting into the database without his monitoring, and is only willing to open certain ports -- in other words, if the IT person is on vacation, and the system crashes, we have to wait until he gets back so that he can let our vendor fix the problem under his watchful eye...if he's at lunch and there's a problem, we're stuck until he gets back, etc. Basically, this would be so tightly controlled that an in-house server running Koha is a practical impossibility. So we're still going with Koha as a hosted option. Also, looking at how we want the overall design of the Koha pages, we're realizing that we hadn't thought too in-depth about the interface possibilities. We've chatted with our *very* helpful web department, and they are quite happy to share our style sheets, etc., for an integrated look.

My mistakes:

-I assumed that because the entire library staff, and the chiefs in admin. supported my goals, my ils solution, and my vendor, that IT would support us as well. Not necessarily true
-I didn't fully understand the resistance to sharing or allowing access to data from IT-vendor
-I didn't engage these folks in discussion before initiating a relationship with my vendor...I made the decision (and received approval) prior to truly having a deep discussion with other departments - I did discuss it with them, but it was, apparently, insufficient (for reasons I'm still trying to determine)

Lessons learned:

-Involve both web folks and IT folks early...let them know your plans, what might be required, and ask if they are willing to support this project...before even considering migrating. Don't assume that they will be interested in assisting you; make sure they're willing to play ball
-Really get a feel for the design options and interface, though it is difficult to know all of the possibilities