Version 9.04

Upgrade Time

The upgrade time from version 9.0x should be relatively short.

This is a WALKAROUND install if upgrading from version 9.00 and 9.01. It will self deploy if upgrading from version 9.02.

Key Changes in Version 9.04.14

There is on new feature that has been added to allow you to plot your patrons on a map using google. Only about 100 distinct points are supported by google's static map function but it lets you see where distributions of people lie. The picture at the tight is from patrons on Poplar street in Memphis. The data was geo-encoded using google's geo-encoding api.

This data can be accessed from the patron list or a patron mail list using the context menus.

Almost everything else in this version is primarily a minor usability enhancement release and a collection of minor bug fixes. It is recommended for all venues using version 9. The following changes have been made to Theatre Manager since version 9.02

There are no mandatory web page changes or additional tasks that a venue need do after installation that are specific to this version. There were some minor wording changes in some web pages that do not need to be made if you are satisfied with your current pages. Please read prior release notes if upgrading from earlier versions to see if there are tasks for earlier versions.

Point Release Version History

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

• 9.04.00 - Sept 21, 2010

Ticket Selling and Associated Processes

• The best seat algorithm has been substantially improved for searching for seats when the '#' is used in the best area (This mainly affects dinner theatre venues with 2 and 4 tops). It also does a preemptive check to make sure that any seat that might be offered is not in an expired shopping cart that has not yet been cleaned up.
• Printing tickets now does a better job of catching some diacritical characters in the data to be printed on a ticket face and change them to non-accented characters - so at least the text will print.
• Fixed condition checking for the response from the 'manager over ride' window for some functions. It now properly catches people closing the window and interprets the response as a 'deny' instead of 'accept'
• Quarterly Post Dated Payments are now 3 months apart instead of 4 months
• the full credit card information is no longer shown on the 'auto-renewal' tab of season subscriptions for any user. it will only show the masked card number. This avoids needing to generate audit transactions for this situation.
• Fixed an issue with Orbital that prevented authorizations of names or addresses were longer than 30 characters.
• Events marked inactive no longer can be sold at the box office or the internet. Previously Theatre Manager only checked the on-sale flags. it now checks the active flag as well.
• Added a feature when changing merchant accounts. If you move a credit card payment type from being associated with one merchant to another, any unprocessed post dated payments are now moved along to the new processor. This saves deleting and re-entering post dated payments. For venues that added a new merchant record recently and who have this issue, you can move the payment from the new merchant account, back to the old, then back to the new merchant account to pick up the post dated payments and get them under the correct merchant. Then they will work without deleting them
• Enhancement when decoding swiped credit cards to work with swipes that send a start string of 5B instead of the normal %B
• Revised using gift certificates after the order is complete so that the process is able to be used from the ticket tab and the order tab under various scenarios. Previously, it would only work from the order tab using the 'payment' button
• Fixed an issue where coupon codes could not be accepted at the Box Office in all cases
• Fixed a plugin issue in certain cases

Patron Management

• Added a Passport number to the patron record for those venues that do touring and need that information.
• Fix a bug where opening the 'other patron' in a relationship record would open the second patron window in a funny display state. It now opens the other patron properly.
• There is a new feature/option to allow sending addresses to Google to have them provide latitude/longitude information for an address (this is set in system preferences). Previously this came from the built in city lookup table. The added benefit for US customers of using google is that it may provide more accurate date right to the house level. If Google does not provide a suitable lat/long, then the city lookup table is used as a secondary option automatically
• Tm now tracks how addresses were geo-encoded. You can select a number of addresses from the patron list or within a mail list and ask Google to geo-encode them more accurately. Data already encoded by Google will not be re-encoded. Note: google only allows approximately 2500 encodings per day per URL for non-commercial purposes.
• You can select a number of addresses on the mail list and/or patron list and encode them.

Donations

• Added a tab to the donation detail to allow associating tasks and meetings with a donation
• The donation list in the patron window now includes an icon that shows if a donation still has post dated payments that have not yet been processed.
• Prevent entering large numbers into the donation giving level ranges. The limit is 12 digit donation levels.
• Quarterly pledge reminders are now 3 months apart instead of 4 months
• Default the fiscal and program year on soft credits and matching gifts to be the same as the original gift when entering it for the first time.
• Fixed the 'donors behind in their pledge payments' report as well as a stored procedure that tracks the data to print on the report

Mail Lists

• Added an option to select all members of a household to add to the mail list if at least one member of the household was found using the criteria. You can now add a) only the patron found, b) the primary household member or c) all members of the household
• Mail lists now allow you to select between who buys the tickets or who the tickets were gifted to when determining who to add to the mail list for tickets
• Fixed saving of criteria and restoring saved criteria in reports and mail lists

Web Sales

• Fixed the probable cause of some holds being left in a shopping cart when the patron checked out - and the tickets not being sold but left in an interminable 'i' status. It occurred when two people were looking at the same seats and any one of the patrons were browsing anonymously. It could also lead to cart checkout problems on systems under load.
• Fixed an issue where searching for best seats on the web could leave an inordinate number of 'temporary' locks on seats so that they could not be purchased by somebody in the box office. A web listener always had access to any seats that they temporarily held and released
• Fixed a condition where specifying an alternate port for web listeners did not work properly.
• No longer allow random generated passwords for patron web access to have a spaces in them. This affected the ability to copy/paste passwords from 'forgot my password' emails into the web sales component if the last character in the password was a space
• The icon used to access server stats on the web listener window has been changed to be the apache logo
• Remote assistance has been added as a button to the web sales window in case people need it. It was disabled and not-available on the main toolbar
• Use of secure FTP now really means FTP with TLS. The next version of TM will support FTP with TLS and FTP with startTLS
• Fixed an issue with dollar value gift certificates sold on line where the purchase amount was not being set right if it was a variable price gift certificate
• Fixed an issue where logging in with an email typed in upper case was not properly converting it to lower case before checking if the user was in the database
• Fixed an issue when searching for best seats in a section and the section was full which could cause the listener to loop looking for more seats and appear hung
• Fixed an issue where it was possible for people not to find their email if they typed it in a different case than when they originally entered it.
• Changed the encoding of all html web pages to be UTF8 so that any accented characters in the database would be rendered properly on the web pages and the full web page will be returned.

Facility Management

• Fixed a small bug where access to resources could have been disabled in the setup menu.
• Fixed a display issue where all day calendar items were not showing up in the calendar if the event overlapped onto the next day/week/month of the calendar
• Changed the icon for 'waiting for response' to a meeting invitation so that it is not as similar to the 'new response' icon
• There are new fewer un-neccessary growl messages when the notification window is updated
• The behaviour of the notifications window has been improved in a number of areas. Some labels have been given better descriptions, tasks for today no longer show alarms, and you can now add meetings you create yourself to your own iCal or outlook calendar by sending a meeting notification.
• Fix display of people working an entire event in the 'play/event' detail window
• Adjustments to display when looking at the volunteer planning calendar
• Changed the security setting in all locations that access task resources so that the security item is common
• Fix cosmetic display issue when adding multiple people to the same task to schedule a meeting. TM no longer shows all the participants on the patron window temporarily.
• Added a 'facility Management' tab to company preferences to consolidate any future preferences into one place. Some company preferences information was moved as a result
• Duplication of a project now gets the correct default play information
• Fixed an issue where duplicating a project did not update the hierarchy of categories in the project properly
• when duplicating a project, the order number is now cleared so that the duplicated project can be billed to another client
• Changing a task that forces a refresh of the calendar will no longer switch the calendar to the default view for the filter. It will now stay on the current view the user sets the calendar in.
• All calendars now update when a filter is edited
• Fixes to entering volunteer history date/time and duration when associating it with events and performances
• Fixed an issue when when multiple volunteer records were dropped onto a calendar, the calendar could display the same record multiple times until the screen was refreshed.
• When performance dates were changed, volunteer history records were not properly being updated based on the new date/times. Now fixed and date/times adjusted automatically.
• Fixed some issues where volunteer hours were not being calculated correctly

Theatre Maps

• Adding pictures to new venue maps have a restriction in size so that multi-megabyte images are not allowed to be stored - for performance reasons. The graphic maps are meant to be vector based (PICT or WMF) and small for performance, generally under 100K.
• Detect a condition where changing the logical seat numbers of seats in a map might cause the seat names for existing tickets to go out of sync. Any change to the logical seat order with in the 'seat name' tab will now update all existing tickets to ensure consistency.

Miscellaneous

• Fixed issue where mail list telemarketing report would not print
• Fixed issue where preferences and window positions would not save. This occurred when people logged in simultaneously to multiple machines
• Changed fonts used on the table tent report for dinner theatres when the report is printed on a PC. It should now paginate better
• Prevent using Postgres version 9 database server if bytea_encoding parameter is set to anything other than 'escape'. This is for compatibility with venues that may wish to install the recently released postgres 9.0.1 version of the server. Postgres 8.4.4 is still the minimum accepted version of the database server.
• remove the BOM marker at the beginning of the 'Seat Export' (theatre maps), the GL entry export and other export of lists.. This should allow other systems and programs (like Excel) that are not UTF8 compatible to still handle UTF8 exports without the BOM character at the beginning.
• Changed the location where Theatre Manager looks for the application preference file on windows 2000/XP from USERPROFILE to APPDATA. For almost every user, this will be transparent. If a venue has done linking of the APPDATA directory to a network folder, this version of Theatre Manager supports that feature
• Updated the version of TeamViewer Remote Access to be latest available
• Additional fields have been added to the data import process for the user to use

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'. Please note that ALL the web pages changes in this version are minor grammatical changes or of minimal impact and do not need to be implemented unless you wish to make them.
• Compare the new standard web pages for the web pages listed below and make appropriate changes.

Changes to Web Pages

Please download the web page updates and compare the web pages.

Files in the each outlet directory (1)
TMcheckoutConfirmation.html	Cosmetic wording changes
TMmailListUnverifiedEmail.html	Cosmetic gramatical change to the text that says venue will not disclose any information. Changes were made in a couple of words to make the meaning clear.
TMpasswordChangedEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
TMpasswordEmptyEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
TMpasswordForgotEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
TMpasswordResetEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
TMpatronNewEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
TMpatronUpdateEmail.html	Cosmetic grammatical change, see above.
Files in the main templates directory
rowFutureTicketPrintCourse.html	small code change to display bar code only if the setting for the event is to print tickets. If tickets are not to be printed for the event (and bar codes are allowed online), then no bar code will be printed for this ticket.
rowFutureTicketPrintFestival.html	same as above
rowFutureTicketPrintReserved.html	same as above
rowOldCartPrintCourse.html	same as above
rowOldCartPrintFestival.html	same as above
rowOldCartPrintReserve.html	same as above
rowOldCartPrintSub.html	same as above
tmnavButtons.html	changed the default coding to not show multi- language by default.