When Netflix raised its rates last year, it had a lot of unhappy customers on its hands. I think a big part of the dissatisfaction was that people already felt like they weren’t quite getting their money’s worth when they had DVDs just sitting around for a while without being watched. There are plenty of other subscription services out there that are in the same boat. If you are paying for a subscription to something, you want it to be available when you need it.
The Callisto service of Sharp Moon Inc. facilitates maintaining those subscriptions for libraries and universities. You can rest at ease knowing that the service is monitoring access to your e-resources and ensuring they are always available to patrons and students.
It would be nice if e-resources would always “just work” but that isn’t the case as their configuration can be quite delicate thanks to required VPN access, IP address range limits, proxies, and not to mention the vendors. Say somebody upstream updated a firewall and it closed a port that was used to validate the organization. Without it, access is terminated. The Callisto service is able to diagnose and alert the people responsible that there is a problem meaning you find out about it sooner and not the next time somebody wants to use it. Greater uptime means greater satisfaction.
Not only is Sharp Moon’s Callisto service revolutionary, I also know and can vouch for the company’s founders. They are great people but they also know what they’re talking about with many years of IT experience at a university library in their backgrounds. They have dealt first-hand with the headaches they are trying to solve.
If this sounds like something that would be a life saver to your organization, I recommend that you contact Sharp Moon and take them up on the free 30-day trial. They also have more great services on the horizon, so I’m excited to see what they come up with next and wish them great success.