Heritage Cirqa offers all the sophisticated functionality of the mature Heritage product but with the added benefit of being accessible from anywhere via the Internet.

This version of the software has been designed to work in conjunction with an IIS Heritage service so that it can be accessed remotely from anywhere over the internet. It is based on standard Windows Internet technologies yet is still easily maintainable by library staff. 

There is no need for any additional library staff training for those already familiar with Heritage as both the functionality and user interface will remain the same. Existing users can upgrade to it when they are ready and all new customers will receive it as a matter of course.

You can find out more on how the name came about by reading "What's in a name: Cirqa or Circa".

Summary of Heritage Cirqa features and purpose

• There is no cost for the upgrade for users already running Heritage Online.
• It represents a significant change in the internal aspects of the application which has enabled distributed use of Heritage over the internet.
• Any Windows workstation that has a good internet connection should be capable of running all aspects of Heritage over the internet (if the Cirqa installation has been setup to run this way).
• The internals of Heritage will use established Windows technologies (.NET, IIS) to communicate via http/https.
• There have been relatively few changes to the functionality and user-interface of Heritage. This will minimise the learning process involved with implementing the upgrade.
• Brand-new to the upgrade is a highly sophisticated job scheduler. A huge benefit of this is the running of reports as a background process, thus freeing up your local copy of Heritage for other tasks. More information about the advantages of Heritage reporting are available.
• Reports and batch processes run faster on Heritage Cirqa since all the data retrieval and processing happens on the server (rather than being subject to the client-server network bandwidth restrictions).
• Heritage Cirqa has at last enabled us to provide a full hosting service to Heritage customers of any size. If you might be interested in us hosting all of Heritage Cirqa for you please contact us for further details and an estimate of the likely costs.
• The new model also facilitates our new 'eLibrarian' service, details of which can be found on our support website.