On Tuesday, May 26, Drew University entered into an agreement with EBSCO Information Services which will provide the University Library with a FOLIO tenant in their production environment (aka cloud.)
The first questions that we had to answer were:
- Do you want any of the reference data pre-loaded, or a completely blank shell?
In my experience I have found that a good portion of what they are calling reference data (e.g. pre-fab item types) don't end up getting used and others need to be created. I would rather load all of the data from scratch rather than have to sift thru and delete what we won't use and add what we will. So I asked them to make it a completely blank shell.
- SMTP server for outgoing emails – Do you want to use our SMTP server or Drew University's SMTP server?
We will start out using theirs. We can't change this setting in the FOLIO UI but if we decide that we want to (we could either use Google or Drew's internal SMTP server) we can ask EBSCO support to do that for us.
On the morning of Friday, May 29, we got word that our tenant had been built along with usernames and passwords so that we could begin working in our new system. Two minutes later (co-incidentally - the meeting had already been booked) the FOLIO Implementation Team met to discuss some of the philosophies and priorities about how to accomplish the work of configuring the new system, migrating our bibliographic and user data from our old system, and training ourselves how to use FOLIO and re-write the documentation