Wishlist: Easier Workstation Management at the Local Administration Level

[Chris Sharp]

Spawning from a request from a library to delete unused workstations, and an IRC discussion: http://irc.evergreen-ils.org/evergreen/2019-11-11#i_426257 ...

It would be useful to have a Workstation Administration UI that would allow a system administrator to see/manage/delete active workstations. Thoughts so far:

 - add a deleted flag to actor.workstation and hide any that are deleted = true from the UI

 - add a "last use" field (either on actor.workstation or somehow virtually) to the workstation so the admin can see whether the workstation should be considered "active"

 - add logic so that deleted workstations can no longer be used if deleted = true

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

Big +1, I think this would be very helpful to local admins.

[Jennifer Bruch (jbruchpails)]

This would be very helpful for PaILS/SPARK libraries as well.

[Lindsay Stratton (lstratton)]

This would be extremely helpful. In our consortia, staff use their own workstations, and many register duplicates on a regular basis.

+1 to actually deleting a workstation, not just "removing" it
+1 to last use field, helpful to identify most current workstations if (near)duplicates exist
+1 block re-use of deleted workstations

In addition, I would add:
- functionality to link workstations to specific users if possible
- functionality to clear entries in actor.workstation_setting when a workstation with settings applied is deleted. Currently (3.8), settings applied to "removed" workstations are still included. Although, this may be a moot if workstation deleted flags are implemented.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Things to bear in mind:

1) Many of us who move between multiple machines during the day use the same workstation name on each so that we can retain our workstation preferences on all of them.

2) And on the other end of the spectrum, when we have multiple circ staff using a single machine, we typically only have a single workstation set up on that machine so that all users share the same workstation settings. If each user had to use their own workstation in a location with a lot of staff, it would be burdensome to set up and maintain, especially for those locations using Hatch.

[Michele Morgan (mmorgan)]

+1 to this.

A create_date would also be helpful to record.

Another useful concept would be an option to lock down workstation creation. This would allow a more deliberate workstation creation workflow instead of the on-the-fly method of creation that currently exists.

For example, a local admin could create a canonical list of workstations that a staff member registering a workstation could choose from. This would eliminate near duplicate workstations like:

BR1-REF Desk
BR1-Ref Desk
BR1-Ref-Desk
etc...

I wonder about Lindsay's wish to link workstations to specific users. Is this a way to make settings for the workstation follow the user? If that's the case, changing those workstation settings to user settings could help with that issue.

I didn't see documentation on changing the context of settings, so opened bug 2011455.

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Just a heads up there is an Angular workstation admin page that's not being used yet:

/eg2/en-US/staff/admin/workstation/workstations/manage

If we're going to tweak this UI, may as well take the opportunity to migrate to the Angular version.