FOLIO Project Update – Week of June 3, 2019

The FOLIO Product Council continued its discussions of the need for documentation and planning for the June 17-19 FOLIO working meeting.

The FOLIO Technical Council continued to discuss and prioritize the Tech Debt issues in prep for the meeting in DC.

The Consortia SIG continued its discussion of UXPROD-795 and the various resource sharing scenarios that exist at different consortia.

On May 31, the Sys Ops & Mgt SIG wrapped up an old action list. Anton works with the Kubernetes subgroup on continuous deployment and release management using a Jenkins server. Tod and Harry put together a JIRA issue about database schema upgrading which had been identified an item of technical debt by the PC. The group adds requirements. The rest of the session was dedicated to a discussion about the Workflow proposal. The group doubts that alternatives to using Camunda as the workflow engine have been thoroughly investigated. Camunda is a very complicated piece of software. One reason for Camunda is that it is easy to implement and that it is well established in industry, so that it will have support. The SIG thinks that It would be wiser to build FOLIO in a way that the workflow engine will be replaceable. In fact, they see this latter as a key requirement for implementing workflows in FOLIO. The group considers the effort to solve problems with a workflow engine fairly similar to an actual software development effort and thus questions the need of a workflow engine at all. What libraries will really need is the To-Do App. The group finds that it didn’t see enough use-cases for a workflow engine, on which a proposal for building one could rely. We know of no document that defines the problem that is being solved. The group will therefore invite experts to the next group meeting to explain some workflows which they need. The group can think of some use-cases which require automatic interactions with the modules: batch processes and the re-implementation of LS-Tools. On June 7, Jeremy Huff summed up the main points of the FOLIO Workflow PoC of December 2018. The group discussed the PoC and compared it to the concept laid out in the current Workflow Proposal. The group sees pros and cons of implementing workflows in FOLIO. They made a detailed list about those advantages or objections. Overall, the group is in favor of implementing workflows in FOLIO, if an Okapi module mod-workflow as described in the PoC will be part of the implementation. They see a generalized view of workflows regardless of the processing engine as a crucial point.

The Community Outreach SIG heard a recap of the meetup in Colorado. Hosted by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, the Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC), Marmot Library Network and University of Colorado Libraries, it was the largest meetup in North America to date. At the meetup, the head of Marmot announced his plans to propose a Public Library SIG, which he will bring to the PC for approval.