12 Mar 10 Monday iMIS maintenance to affect member access to ALA Connect & website
We need to perform maintenance on iMIS, our association management software, and have an opportunity at end of day Monday, March 15th. During the time it will take to perform this maintenance, iMIS will be unavailable, as well as any portions of the web site that require login. That includes meeting registration and access to member resources on the website and to ALA Connect. The maintenance period will start at 5:00 P.M. Central Daylight Savings time and will last several hours if all goes well.
ITTS will install an announcement in ALA Connect to notify members. On Monday evening, the login page for the website will be replaced with a notification about the maintenance outage, suggesting that members return in several hours to try again. The public areas of the website, Moodle courses, blogs, and wikis will not be affected by this project, and will continue to be available to members throughout the upgrade.
Please forward this message to your lists, and post this information in any places that will help get it out to members.
22 Dec 09 Major iMIS Upgrade Planned
iMIS is the Association’s membership management system and database, and is central to functions such as renewal. From a member perspective, there have been a couple (2) of brief (several seconds each) outages during the last week due to heavy traffic. While the next two weeks should be relatively slow, the week prior to Midwinter will be an active one, so we wanted to alert members about the situation and planned upgrades.
We have been experiencing slowness with our iMIS Membership System over the past several weeks due to increased utilization.
In anticipation of this, we have been planning a major server upgrade, and will be upgrading hardware, operating system, and SQL versions to improve performance. While we have the server hardware ready to go, we do not have the full complement of staff and consultants required to make the transition until early January. Because when we make the transition to the new server, all the systems that touch the iMIS database will have to be tested to be sure everything is okay, we have decided to do the upgrade after the Midwinter meeting.
What does this mean to you?
If you are working in the iMIS system and experience slowness, please be patient, and try again later. If you are a member and experience slowness logging into the website, registering for an event, renewing your membership, or making a donation, please try again later.
29 Sep 08 Membership Data Appearing in Connect!
Even as ALA staff work furiously to resolve issues with the new website, we’re still pushing forward with ALA Connect. If you felt the earth rumble a couple of days ago, it’s because we’re all doing the happy dance over here because the iMIS import and connection is fully functional.
That means members will be able to log into the system using their regular website login information, and Connect will automatically know which ALA groups they are affiliated with (divisions, round tables, sections, and conference registrations). We’ve had high hopes for this all along, but it’s still amazing to see it in action. In the screenshot below, you can see me logged in to view the ALSC community. Because I’m a member of the Association for Library Service to Children, I can see content posted to the group.
However, when I go to the Association for College & Research Libraries group, I’m not a member so I can’t see any content, which means the system is working as it should after the initial import.
There’s still a lot of work to do on the interface, including the creation of help documents and tutorials. All in all, though, we’re still taking 30 seconds to enjoy staring at the screen with huge grins on our faces. 🙂
Tags: drupal, iMIS, membership data
05 Sep 08 Hey, Your iMIS Is in My Drupal
Good news to report today. It’s taken longer than anticipated, but we have our first working connection between iMIS and Drupal!
First of all, what is iMIS? If you haven’t heard us throw around this term before, it’s our membership database, and it tracks all of your dues, committee assignments, round tables and sections memberships, conference registrations, etc. It’s much more than just a database, though, as it’s also the software that lets us update committee rosters each year, send you conference registration info, etc.
We’ve known all along that ALA Connect had to be able to work with iMIS in order for us to be able to tell what your affiliations are within ALA. So it’s with great relief that we can report that last week, our developer – Urban Insight – conducted a successful test that allowed users to log in to ALA Connect (Drupal) using their regular website logins (from iMIS). This is a huge step forward for phase one, as it means you won’t have to memorize yet another login.
Even better, it means we can pre-populate a lot of your profile for you. So if you’re a member of ACRL and you serve on a committee, we’ll fill that in for you ahead of time. As we set up the virtual workspace for your committee, Connect will also give you access to it automatically within the system so that you don’t have to sign up for it manually. Three cheers for saving the user’s time!
This also bodes well for phase two of our project, in which we make all of your data start working hard for you. We hope to be able to get previous “participations,” as well as current ones, so we should be able to pre-populate your profile with all of the great work you’ve done for ALA in your professional career. That way, if you decide you want to display your profile to colleagues, potential employers, or even publicly, we’ll have created a curriculam vitae of all of your contributions. Pretty cool, right?
But I’m getting ahead of myself, as we have to get phase one out the door first. As work on the iMIS/Drupal module continues, I want to note the great work Urban Insight is doing (go, Ki!), pioneering something I know a lot of other associations are also anxiously awaiting. The folks at RSM McGladrey wrote the original iMIS web service methods (yay, Susan and Bruce!), which are working very well, so we couldn’t have gotten this far without them, either.
It’s exciting to have crossed this bridge, and we should have a new timeline to share soon. Keep watching this site for more updates.
23 Mar 07 iMIS Patch Needed
We have received notice that a patch has been released for iMIS 10. This patch corrects a problem with some transactions. We have not experienced many of these problems, but must install the patch anyway. We will notify everyone in advance when we are ready to install the patch.
31 Oct 06 iMIS Upgrade Updates – October 2006
Following the iMIS upgrade (September 19), it was discovered that changes in member profiles made via the website were not being written to the iMIS database. While the changes were not lost, subsequent visits to the member profile did not reflect any changes. The problem has been fixed and all changes have been processed. We are also working on a number of custom reports that no longer worked after the upgrade. We are now in a position to upgrade as new releases become available.
28 Sep 06 iMIS Upgrade Updates – September 2006
iMIS was successfully upgraded to version 10.6 on September 19th. The upgrade was delayed several days because an interim upgrade was required by ASI (the system manufacturer) in order to avoid data loss during the main upgrade. Some iMIS-to-Web incompatibilities were discovered early on and corrected the day after the upgrade took place. Staff are still working through some issues with reports from iMIS. Staff have been attending iMIS refresher sessions throughout the month. Implementation of installment payments for dues is next up.
05 Sep 06 iMIS Ugrade Updates – May 2006
May 2006
A kickoff meeting for this project was held on Wednesday, May 10th. A test conversion will happen in June. Interviews with key users will be taking place over the next two weeks (late May / early June). Demonstrations for staff will be held after Annual Conference.
05 Sep 06 iMIS Ugrade Updates – June/July 2006
June/July 2006
Key users were interviewed in late May and the test conversion was performed July 18, 2006. Early indications are that it went well. Web applications that interface to iMIS still need to be tested. Demonstrations for staff will be scheduled in the near future.
05 Sep 06 iMIS Ugrade Updates – August 2006
August 2006
The iMIS upgrade is scheduled for the weekend of September 15, 2006. Introductory sessions have been held for staff, with more to come on September 7th. Two-hour training sessions will be held throughout the fall. There will be a slight interruption to iMIS availability during the upgrade, and we will notify users as early as possible. To facilitate the iMIS upgrade, each desktop in the building was visited by ITTS staff on August 26th to install Zen Works software. Zen Works will allow us to automatically update each workstation’s software when the time comes, and will allow us to push out properly configured browsers ahead of the Collage implementation.
