Hi Mahendray

Well we are in the process of finalizing (on behalf of our client) an open source Library management system. Some background: we surly have a soft corner for PHP based OS, as we are out and out PHP shop. My team has shortlisted 3 options, and Koha is on the top of the list. Koha being on Perl I, as the project lead am not very comfortable. Why?

1.       There could be implementation/deployment problems

Well there could be with any system. Koha has now been around for quite a long time, and there are a lot of people who have experience installing Koha. It takes an experienced installer only a few hours to get a copy going, assuming the server is working with a current/suitable OS.  There are a few preferred versions of Linux to use - Debian & Mandrake I think have the most support within the community.

2.       In the situation where the client needs us to integrate some more functionalities/feature sets it will be a problem for us to understand the codes in perl.

Your options would be to hire a perl programmer, or to outsource to someone else, or presumably do your new work if it's entirely new functionality in php. Modifying existing code would require perl skills.

3.       Our client need a language option (HINDI) the full system to be on both English and Hindi

They (or you) are likely to need to do translations - particularly for the librarian interface, but that isn't an overly technical job.

4.        And Pl send us the details that reagarding installations as we have redhat linux machine on it how do i setup it all will koha use same Mysql Phpmyadmin or it is using another database type??

You'll need to use the installers and read the documentation. There might be a problem with accessing documentation this week but I think that glitch is being fixed up. Koha uses MySQL, and you can use PhPmyAdmin.

I would really appreciate any feedback from the community/developers of Koha as to how much can they help us in any of the following situations, or is it that we will have to manage everything in-house

There are 2 sorts of support - free and paid.

Free support will generally be a bit slower, and will generally be at the level of pointing you in the direction of the right bit of code, or the right bit of documentation, the mailing list,  or where to look to solve your problem yourselves. It will assume some technical know how and that you have permissions etc on your box to actually fix whatever it is. Someone at your office will likely end up knowing a bit about Perl, and a lot about Koha, not in itself a bad thing.

Paid support can be at what ever level you're comfortable with, from taking a look at your install and troubleshooting/fixing glitches you're having, to doing the whole install and and customisation as well. It will likely cost more actual money, but take less time/effort on your part.

If you're thinking you'll want to do more Koha installs then it is probably worth the time to get someone at your office trained up to do most of it yourselves, and just outsource any specialist perl programming you need doing.

Good luck, and we hope you choose Koha :-)

What are the other candidates by the way?

Cheers
Rachel


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Rachel Hamilton-Williams
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