Tape Chart Additions

In an effort to further develop our tool to better serve your business, we have added additional features to our Tape Chart. On bookings, you can now click through from an existing reservation to the booking details. This will enable you to see reservations and availability in a aggregate view, but also allow you to quickly access these reservation details from the same screen.

On the Tape Chart you can also...
1. Search by date range
2. Create a new booking by clicking on an available date
3. Filter by property types
4. Print the grid by date range
5. Scroll to the previous/next 30 days with a click

Outage on 2/25/10

Bookt's services were disrupted on 2/25/2010 from approximately 2AM EST to 6:30AM EST. This was a repeat of the issue we had earlier this week in which a fus was tripped on our power block due the additional servers and hardware we recently installed. We are expediting the installation of additional power and expect this to be ready in the next few days.In the meantime, we have added additional monitor systems to detect any power issues as quickly as possible.

Services's Outage 2/23

A message from Ben Strum, V.P of Technology

At approximately 3:49PM EST, we experienced a service outage. The outage was due to a power failure which required us to manually reset machines at our datacenter. This added to time to get our services fully running again. Solution sites and control panel access were restored at about 5:30PM EST while Bookt Connect services were restored at 6:30PM EST.


All of our services are currently restored and to ensure that this type of incident does not happen in the future, we are ordering more power at our datacenter.

Multiple Notification Email Support

You can now send your lead and booking notifications to multiple email addresses. Simply go to System>>Solution Setup, and add the notification emails separated by a comma (“,”). In the future we will be adding support to send lead and booking notifications to separate email addresses.

Services Outage 2/20

Web services went down on 2/20/2010 at 9:34am EST and were out until 10:39am EST. All services have now been restored.

The root cause of the outage was with our load balancer which appears to have shutdown its interface to the Internet. We are working with the load balancer vendor to resolve the issue. In the near future, we will also be adding an additional load balancer running in parallel to further reduce the possibility of this event happening.

We regret this inconvenience. We can assure you that we will be working hard over the next week to institute measures that will prevent this from happening in the future, and further increase the overall performance of the platform.

2/17 Development Release – New Support for Booking, Leads, and Notifications

Booking Screens
As part of our release last night, we introduced some additional support for the Control Panel booking screens. When creating a booking, you will now notice support for:

• Selecting a specific unit of a property (property must have sub-units; more applicable to resorts and hotels)


• Email Statement – now available at all times on the booking screen. So you can email this statement out multiple times as needed
  
• Statements
  -When selecting a property for a date range, the line items will populate automatically
  
  -You can add or delete a line item
  
  -You can edit an existing line item i.e. give a discount
  
  -You can apply a special by using the picker
  
  -Screen Shot Dev. Solution

Lead Email Responses
When responding to leads via email in the Control Panel, we are now populating the response field with a template pulling relevant information including: guest name, property, dates, and price. This will also populate the Control Panel user’s name in the signature. You will want to verify this information prior to sending it out, but it should help increase your overall efficiency with processing leads.

Server Maintence Scheduled 2/17 @1am ET

Tomorrow morning at 1am ET we will be performing server maintenance. We expect our services to be temporarily unavailable at for up to 30 minutes during that time. The maintenance is necessary to complete the configuration of the new hardware.

Additional Hardware Added to the Platform

As of 2/14, we have successfully installed and configured new hardware onto the platform. This hardware was added to scale ahead of the platform's growing server requests. Since the installation, we are monitoring significant improvements in average page load speeds for both the Control Panel, and for your website. When more data is collected over the next couple weeks, we will post blog quantifying these results.

Specific Property Pickers for Taxes/Fees

During our latest release, we opened up a popular feature for additional controls - the specific property picker. This was first released for "Specials" setup. Now when you setup a new Tax or Fee you can easily select which specific properties/rooms they apply to. This saves time so you don't have to access each unit individually to apply the setting.

When setting up a new tax or fee that applies to specific properties/rooms, set the type to "Not Global" and save. This means that the tax or fee is for specific properties only ("Global" means apply to all properties). You will now see a new grey button at the top called "Apply to Multiple Properties". When you click on that you will see a full list of all your properties you can apply the setting to.

SEO Editor Phase 1 Release

A topic on everybody's mind - Search Engine Optimization. With the correct strategy, SEO can be one of the most cost effective forms of marketing... especially in the long term. It is extremely important to keep the content on your site original, informational, fresh (blogging), and targeted. You also want to make this content as meaningful for the search engines as it is for your users. In our latest development release 2/1, we include the 2nd version of our SEO page editor. This will ultimately give you control over the URL's, page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords and more advanced attributes of important pages such as property/room details, development/building pages, and predefined searches (category searches). We encourage you to see the new tool but urge you to refrain from making edits until we deliver you proper usage documentation next week. In the control panel, at the bottom pages listed above you will see a blue link "SEO Editor".

The editor is still in 'beta' and has some final styling that will be completely along with the documentation. If you are a SEO Gold service subscriber, do not worry about the changes, they will be facilitated by your Success Management team... this tool just makes their job a little easier. Over the course of this month, we will be doing more frequent development releases due to the high volume of additions we are making to the platform. You can expect an update on ones that will impact you here!

Blog Comments

Users now have the ability to make comments on your blogs! This capability gives your website another interactive function. Although this development is already released, we are working on a series of enhancements including styling, alerts, and eventually blog labels. Over the next couple months we will continue to release these improvements. We continuously see well written blogs driving traffic to individual sites, and we encourage you to take full advantage of this tool and blog at least once a week. Email your Success Manager for ideas on blogging for traffic!

1/28/10 System Outage

On 1/28/2010, the platform experienced an outage in our services. The outage lasted for 30 minutes and was due to a configuration issue with our load balancer. Specifically, the IPS (Intrusion Protection Service) process, which scans and updates the latest connection-based threats and protects the load balancer servers from common threat, had become unstable and stopped connections between the load balancer and our real servers. We have reconfigured this service to prevent this from happening in the future.