App-less in Mercer County
Dear Tech Guru,
The mobile app has been out of service for months. Is there any timeline for when this will be resolved?
From,
App-less in Mercer County
Hi App-less (and all our patrons),
I understand your frustration with the MyMCLSNJ app being unusable. As we have shared, there is a contract conflict between our main vendor and the software vendor. They contracted to initially create the software called BLUEcloud Mobile. This software is what our app, as well as many other apps used by libraries around the world, is built on.
The contract between these two companies was not renewed and the software vendor said they would continue to allow our main vendor to use the one piece of software they provided for a set period of time. This piece of software is what connected our library information to the software that runs the app.
In November of 2023, the software vendor stopped access to their software. This made all the apps that run on BLUEcloud Mobile stop working. At this time, there was a lot of misinformation and back and forth from both companies about what had happened behind the scenes. We were fortunate that our Webmaster had already set up the mobile version of our catalog so that our patrons still had an easy way to access the catalog and their accounts on their mobile devices.
Our main vendor is telling us that there is a chance our current app will come back, but they haven’t been able to provide any solid date for when or if that will happen. In the meantime, they are hard at work developing a new app that will not rely on a secondary vendor for support. That app is currently in a beta pilot program. Your MCLS Information Technology Department is registered to help with the program as we want to ensure that whichever app we provide to our patrons is functional to their needs.
The current timeline is for a general release of the new app software in March. Once that has been released, we can then work on the “backend” of the app to make it ready for release to the public. We will only make the new MyMCLSNJ app available to our patrons once we are sure it is up to our standards.
Best,
Tech Guru
- by Amelia, Information Technology Department
as you go forward with the new software for the new app, please be sure that there is an option for “my lists” or “favorites” as there is four the Internet version. That is something that is sorely missing from the old app and would be most appreciated. Sometimes we like to make a note of the book that we would like to keep in mind, but do not yet want to place a hold upon.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Long time member of the library.
40 year West Windsor resident.