Upgrade Steps

Upgrading to version 9.22 requires, at a minimum:

• Reading current and prior version release notes for version 9.21 back to the version you are currently using. All releases are cumulative, so you get everything since the last release.
• Selecting a quiet time or a dark day to update.
• Follow the general upgrade steps and Install TM on all workstations. This is a walk around install.
• There are 9 web page changes - 6 are new to support customization of the best search window for price codes and seats. The other 3 are centralization of the style sheets to make it easier to incorporate your own if you have different stylesheet names.
• Read the suggestions for 'Things a venue may need to do' at the bottom of each release.

Key Changes in Version 9.22.00

The following changes have been made to Theatre Manager since version 9.21

1. General improvements to the tools to find an out of balance problem caused by resource booking in Facility Management (as well as preventing them)
2. Significant performance improvements to the second generation web server with selective caching.
3. Better notification if email issue when passwords have been found to be incorrect after doing an eblast
4. Introduction of a style sheet for the web called 'normalize.css'. It is an open source project that sets some base styles to remove some subtle display differences between browsers without much work.

Point Release Version History

Point releases are minor version fixes and small enhancements to any particular version.

• 9.22.00 - May 29, 2013
• 9.22.01 - May 30, 2013 (Needs TMServer 0.40.4)
• 9.22.02 - Jun 4, 2013
• 9.22.03 - Jun 7, 2013 and TMServer 0.40.05
• 9.22.05 - Jun 12, 2013 and TMServer 0.40.07
• 9.22.06 - Jun 18, 2013 and TMServer 0.40.08
• 9.22.09 - Jun 26, 2013 and TMServer 0.40.09
• Jul 20, 2013 TMServer 0.42.04 released

Patron Management

• Fixed a situation where a patron may not appear in some patron lists if that patron had a solicitor assigned to it in multiple outlets.
• Fixed issue deleting an event from the 'event' tab on the patron record what would ignore the delete unless you had already added an event first (9.22.02)

Sales Processing

• The rebuild order balance feature takes care of determining taxes on resources and personnel properly.
• Gift certificates, passes and memberships can now have date and time for onsale and offsale. The same change has been made for sales promotions.
• Added the order number back to the transaction list window, along with some other key fields like member number, patron number, donation number, etc.
• Allow opening an order directly from a transaction using a context menu.
• Added a delineation for Bambora credit card processing. You can not identify if the processor is NDC (global payments) or TD Bank. In the case of TD bank, voids will be handled by reducing the outstanding amount on the authorization to zero. Global payments does not support this feature, so the void processing has been changed to work with their back end. Note: this is a recent update to the Bambora servers and TM is simply responding to this change so that voids work for Global Payments. Effectively, we were advised that Global payments wants the void to be ignored, so TM will just delete the payment and it will roll off the patrons card in 7 days.
• Added search by date updated to the recent order list
• When orders are opened at the box office that were created the same day on the internet, any transactions that had been deferred to end of day are now created so that the audit log of sales and refund transactions shows the TS and TR transactions (9.22.05)
• Fixed a small issue with find best seat that prevented identifying seats if there was nothing left to sell in the venue except for seats that had a best area containing a '#' at the end. (9.22.05)
• Added a convenience to setting up subscription favourite seats. Selecting seats in an area will do its best to only show the prices codes that are valid for that area for the selected sales promotion. (9.22.08)
• Adding a seat after the fact to a subscription will track the subscription the seats are with. This meant a small change to pass the subscription package number to the order when accessing the order from the subscription detail window (9.22.08)

Form Letters and Eblast Processing

• A field has been added for each employee and company preferences email address for the purposes of stopping outgoing email if there is an authentication issue:
  • This tracks if a login/authentication failure has occurred using that SMTP server, port, user id, password, etc.
  • If an eblast is occurring where the system cannot log in and the authentication fails due to an invalid password, TM will stop sending emails from that person.
  • Changing the password will reset this, causing eblasting to resume. If authentication is still not right, the flag will be set again and emails will stop. A key feature of this is that 'failure to authenticate' will not mark the emails in 'Error' status. They remain 'Not Done'.
  • Note, a failure to reach the email server does not mean a failure to authenticate. The new TM server will keep trying to send emails if there is a failure to communicate.
  • There is a new 'caution' icon on the list of pending emails that indicates which ones will not send because of failed authentication.
• Implemented a change to the word processing to improve label creation
• Doing an eblast will prevent selecting a sending email address that is in 'failed' status.
• If both the company email and your email cannot authenticate, you will not be able to add more e-blasts until you correct the authentication problem. This should make it more apparent to everybody if somebody changes a password on a mail server and does not change it in Theatre Manager at the same time.
• When editing a form letter, you can now use the page setup from the file menu to change paper settings. This is in addition to the current method of using the tools palette (9.22.03)
• Improve handling of urls and links within an eblast and fix a recently introduced bug where the URL's had an extra " in them. (9.22.03)

Users and Access

• There is a new feature that lets you manage oAuth tokens for employees and patrons. It means you can create or revoke them. Refer to the new web server for more info on how it now supports single sign on after logging into the theatre manager web server.
• On the employee preferences, show the date that the email login failed (if it did) so that it is obvious if a failure occurred because of authentication of their password.
• The employee that is defined as being the 'web listener' employee (company preferences web listener tab) will no longer show on the list of users that can be logged in -- as this is now considered a special user to identify web sales only. It now means that a box office sale can never occur under the auspices of the web user. For the Classic Web Listener, you can log in as anybody and start web sales. When you do that, Theatre Manager automatically switches over to the web sales user id. The preferred method for a dedicated web listener machine is to set the Web Listener ID to auto-login.

Event Setup

• In the setup of a performance, the search by best seating and by best pricing areas have been augmented. You can now turn on (or off) the display of 'prices starting at ' for the best price search on a per-performance basis.

  

• Fixed an issue in mountain lion (10.8) when dropping PICTS on top of the pricing map. Mountain lion no longer provides file information based on the resource fork so TM did not see the contents as a valid pict file. This restores the ability to drop a picture (9.22.01)

Facility Management

• Provide support for creating proper transactions when a task is moved from one project to another - to keep the EOD in balance. In the process of transferring the task, the order number now gets properly assigned to resources and personnel.
• Fix a situation where the billing status of a resource was not always set properly when the project was turned into 'invoice' status. This prevented creating some transactions. The upgrade will reset this field properly for past orders. This addresses things going forward.
• Fix a display issue where tasks that run a long time (months) and which are shown on a big monitor might show the bar on the calendar as a ghost instead of colouring it in properly
• Revise the calculation of personnel and resource totals on orders to exclude resources with zero quantity that are in an order as placeholders and to exclude personnel totals except if the order is in invoice status. (9.22.06)
• Fixed an error causing end of day imbalance where editing the amount of time to bill a person for was not calculating the proper total cost unless the user hit a tab to leave the field. Theatre Manager will not recalculate the prices when save is clicked as well (9.22.08)

Reports

• Update the order-transaction balance report to:
  • Account for memberships that may have taxes in them
  • provide information on resources and personnel usage that have been assigned to an order
• Update the GL transaction balance reports to:
  • account for 'R' and 'F' transactions in calculation of the current GL balance.
  • Account for memberships that may have taxes in them
  • deal with a rare situation where there are to journal numbers with the same number and transactions in either. The report will now separate out the two GL entries
  • Account for discounted resources (9.22.06)
  • Show totals properly when there are taxes in personnel (9.22.06)
  • added the personnel columns to the report and reformatted the report a little to provide space to show all columns. The order number is now in blue under the patron number on the report. (9.22.06)

Second Generation TM Web Server

There are ongoing changes and performance enhancements for the new TM server:

• Reworked online pricing calculations to handle floating point calculations in the same way as the box office so that prices should now be the same when adding taxes and rounding.
• Introduced of basic OAuth support in both TM Server and TM Desktop.. This feature will allow patrons or employees to log into the TM Web services. Venues with their own web systems now have a mechanism to query TM and determine if the person has logged in. The basic purpose is to create a single point of authentication for patrons for a myriad of web services offered by a Venue
• Sales promotions now have a time component for the date and time they go on sale and off sale. You can now set a promotion to be available from 9:05 am, if you wish
• Gift Certificates/Passes/Memberships can also have time component for on and off sale.
• Improve the web log process to reduce the number of log entries written for each interaction with the second generation server. All messages are now accumulated and written as a single log entry for each request. The end result is fewer logs and a performance improvement.
• Revised the handling of username/password errors when sending bulk email via TM Server. If the server cannot log in (i.e. receives an authentication error), it now marks the employee account (or default account) as invalid. If a new merge attempts to use that account, the user will be informed before the emails are sent that they need to fix the password
• Added full page and database result caching throughout the second generation server. Caching has a 60 second life-time in all cases, which means you may need to wait that little bit of time to see a page change. This dramatically improves performance in high load scenarios.
• Add customizable templates for the F_HTML_BEST_AREA_SEARCH_LIST and F_HTML_BEST_PRICE_CODE_SEARCH_LIST into TMtemplates. This lets you customize how to you want to see data on the best seat search and the best price search. In addition to customization, you can now turn on (or off) the display of 'prices starting at ' on a per-performance basis.
• Fixed a corner case where entering a coupon would not work if the param= parameter was missing from the web page. This would only occur if the user customized the ticket search or shopping cart web page and left out the hidden parameter 'param=' for an alternate place to send the user after successfully entering a coupon or preaccess code. This is part of TMServer 0.40.05
• Fix searching by venue if the event has a pricing map that is not the same number and the venue number that the pricing map is in (0.40.07)
• Prevent a log message for venues that do not have any coupons activated at the venue (0.40.08)
• Fix a corner case for taking events off sale if there are different offsale lead times for the event and performance. (0.40.09)

Classic Web Listener

There are some minor enhancements to the classic web listener. These will continue to occurs as needed until the second generation server handles all services.

• Relax a rule and allow landing on the subscription page without giving the user the message that they don't have a cookie. This is for links like login&subscription=0
• If a donation is added that requires a benefit to be paid, this is now added to an online donation at the appropriate giving level. (9.22.01)
• Alter the message that appears on the new and edit patron windows to indicate that company is mandatory. The message indicates that company is mandatory if name is not provided (9.22.03)

Miscellaneous

• Fix a very odd situation where changing the company short name in company preferences to a single invalid character like a ` would prevent people logging in due to an invalid role name for the database. You will now be required to enter at least one character for a company name that is A-Z, a-z or 0-9
• Change the size of the invoice comment from 4096 to 32000 characters.
• Improve tabbing order in the order rebuild window
• Improve performance and reduce the amount of picture conversion needed for the pricing map list. This window should scroll faster and build quicker if there are a lot of pricing maps in one venue.
• The transaction detail window shows taxes for resource transactions
• The transaction detail window shows a debit and credit for POF and POT transactions that offset each other rather than just be empty for payment order transfer transactions.
• Fix a condition that prevented merging of patrons which was introduced in 9.22.00 (9.22.01)
• Fix a possible hang after a window is closed and there is an incomplete search still running in the background (9.22.02)
• Enhancements to the Munis G/L import and Export (9.22.02)
• Added a small change to accommodate the PCI 2.0 standard when deleting previous encryption keys. TM will now write out a null password on the old key record prior to deleting it (9.22.02)
• Updated the invoice to reflect any totals that contain resource discounts as part of the invoice (9.22.08)
• Add capability of importing (9.22.03):
  • sales promotions
  • donation giving levels
• Added new permissions to manage exchanging tickets from past events and for exchanging tickets from events that are no longer on sale. This now mirrors the degree of permissions for refunds (9.22.03)

Things a venue may need to do

• Read all prior release notes back to the version you upgraded from and follow any instructions for each version under the subject 'Things a venue may need to do'.
• If your web listener was not set to auto-login, you may need to follow the instructions to set the web listener as auto-log in. This is now important because the web listener user id no longer appears in the list of people who can log in.
• You will need to adjust the web pages as below, especially if you are using the second generation web server.
• With each point release of Theatre Manager (and if you are using the second generation server), you will need to downloading and install the latest second generation server version just to make sure you have all the latest features.
• Make sure port 6181 to www2.artsman.com is open to allow the update server to verify eligibility for new versions of TM
• If you are using facility management:
  • rebuild all orders since you implemented selling of resources. This is found under setup->Batch functions->order balances. Pick an approximate date range .. or the last 3 years if not sure.
  • Do an end of day to process any new transactions that may be created
  • Run an order-transaction balance for the orders in the past while to see if any appear because of resource transactions -- and correct them
  • This may make your end of day out of balance, but it should do so in a way that reverses any prior EOD imbalances that were forced. If you need help balancing after, please let us know

Changes to Web Pages

Please download the latest web page updates and compare the web pages to your existing pages. (If you have already implemented the 'tmCustom' folder, you can simply replace the pages below). Note that there are over 100 pages that have changed -- none of them mandatory. We have just consolidated the stylesheets into one include file to make it easier for people to add their own stylesheets in a single include

The following itemizes the changes made to web pages:

In the 3rd Column are 3 flags.

• R=Required Page Change - must be made
• M=Mandatory. Only make the page changes if you want one of the new features.
• O=Optional. Mainly cosmetic or only make the change if it is needed because you want to implement the feature that the description column speaks about. Existing web pages should still work with this version of Theatre Manager - so this change can be deferred to later.