Turo Technology LLP

Koha - the free software library system

Koha is an award-winning free software library management tool originally developed by Katipo Communications Ltd of New Zealand for the Horowhenua Library Trust (koha is a Maori word). It is released under the popular GNU GPL copyleft licence and maintained by a world-wide team of contributors, including TTLLP in England. For more general information, please visit the Koha site.

We've offered an installation service, bespoke training and support since 2003. We were responsible for adding basic hosting system support (etcdir and prefix) to the installer; we release-managed part of the 2.0 series; we've helped to debug 2.2; and we're rewriting the sysadmin part of the installer for 3.0.

If you're not sure whether koha is for you, we can give you free access to a demonstration copy when you contact us. If it's nearly what you want, but you'd like a few small changes, see below for details of our development service.

Installation

Koha is a fairly simple system to install, but it's always easier to have your first koha installed by a developer. We're proud to offer this service to you and show you how to do it. Our prices start from £117 for a simple installation on your GNU/Linux host with compatible versions of Perl, Apache and MySQL and the required level of access to them. This includes free technical support for any installation problems that may come to light afterwards. The exact compatibility requirements will change with new Koha versions, so please ask for more details before ordering.

Training

It's also an easy system to manage, but it is highly automated and we offer introductory training on the technical aspects of running a library with Koha. Prices start from £297 per half-day session but vary according to background and experience. Please contact us so that we can help you to design training that meets your needs.

Development

We can develop extra features for you: koha is a perl web application and we've been writing perl almost since we started webmastering, back in 1994. koha and perl are pretty flexible and able to talk to most other systems.

We use a iterative design process and are very experienced with various configuration management systems, so we spend more time working on getting the feature just as you want it, rather than setting everything in stone and struggling to update it with each new koha version. At present, we use the same version control system as the world-famous Linux kernel and keep a copy of koha in this system.

Giving back as standard

Unless you ask us to do otherwise, we will also label the features you develop with your chosen name and give them to contribs.koha.org (or the main release manager, if appropriate), as part of our standard development service. This helps both the koha community and it will hopefully help you, as future users improve your new feature and share those improvements with you.

Please contact us with details of the features you want us to develop for you.