We've just uploaded a minor update to VIP Professional. This is mostly just small internal changes. However, one functional change is that several reports have been more useful / better looking. Those reports are:

• Week-in-Review
• Week-at-a-Glance
• Yesterday-in-Review
• Today-at-a-Glance

These are the most common reports included in notifications (including the pre-defined notifications included by default).

Suggestions or ideas on ways to make reports more useful are always welcomed, of course!

Best wishes to everyone from the development team at Stratogistics! We hope you all have a great holiday season.

If you haven't upgraded yet, download and install our latest release (dated 20 December). We've added extensive import functionality that helps make VIP Professional even more useful and convenient for your business. This was something we've been getting a lot of requests for. We already have ideas on how to make this functionality even better, but please also let us know your ideas -- user feedback has made a huge difference in the application so far.

We're currently overhauling some of the standard reports available within VIP Professional. This has been long overdue - we think you'll like the improvements. We'll do a mini-release soon with this functionality.

Another thing we're doing is updating the built-in help system. Some of the information has fallen out of date. And some of the newer features haven't been covered at all. We'll try to have that ready for mid-January.

And, as always, we are constantly looking for ways to simplify / streamline the application. Let us know your thoughts and ideas!

That's it for now. Enjoy the holidays. Have fun, but stay safe!

We've got another update to VIP Professional available for you.

The main addition in this release is the ability to specify "adds" for each individual named guest in a reservation (rather than just for the Organizer).

This is particularly of interest to nightclub users tracking 'clubber'-style guest lists.

For example, if you have a 'house list' reservation (containing all of your guests who have called in to be on the guest list), you can now create a guest on that reservation with 'adds' - for example, "Rob Davis +2". Previously, you would not have been able to do this in a 'house list'-style reservation -- you'd have needed a separate reservation (since unnamed guests previously could only be linked with the Organizer).

For nightclub users, this should give you even more flexibility in how you record / track your guest lists.

Other additions in this release include a warning if you attempt to add a guest to a reservation that has already been added to another reservation on the same date (double-bookings), printable reports for View / Filter / Duration specifications, various usability tweaks, some optimizations, more sample data, and some small bug fixes.

See the release notes for a complete list of all the improvements.

As always, updates to VIP Professional are entirely free to subscribers. Just download the latest release and install, selecting the option to upgrade your existing database (play it safe and do a back-up before upgrading). All of your data and settings will be upgraded automatically. Your subscription will also be updated.

If you have never tried VIP Professional before, give it a try -- your first month is absolutely free (and you don't even need to sign up or identify yourself until the end of your first month!). It is absolutely risk-free.

We've released another great update for VIP Professional. There's a lot of additional functionality, improvements to existing features, extra content, and more.

See the release notes for a complete list of all the improvements.

As always, updates to VIP Professional are entirely free to subscribers. Just download the latest release and install, selecting the option to upgrade your existing database (as always, play it safe and do a back-up before upgrading). All of your data and settings will be upgraded automatically. Your subscription will also be updated.

If you have never tried VIP Professional before, give it a try -- your first month is absolutely free (and you don't even need to sign up or identify yourself until the end of your first month!). It is absolutely risk-free.

We're on track to release our next update to VIP Professional shortly. We are doing final testing / tweaking now.

Here is what we've added for you:

• Import / Export: You can now import and export Views, Filters, Durations, Lookups, confirmations / reminders, and notifications. This makes it easy for you to share your content / templates with other users. And, of course, it means we can easily release new content for you without you needing to re-download / install VIP Professional.
• We've added a "Did you know..." dialog that appears whenever you start up VIP Professional, with a new tip each time. We hope this will help new users learn some of the more advanced functionality of VIP Professional. Of course, you can turn this dialog off if you don't want it to appear.
• Purge function, which allows you to remove all guests, reservations, user accounts, and similar data. The primary purpose of this is to allow us to include lots of sample data when VIP Professional is first installed. That will help new users familiarize themselves faster with what VIP Professional is capable of. The Purge function makes it easy to get rid of the sample data when you are ready to start entering real data for your business. Of course, you can also use the Purge function any time you want to start with a 'clean' database.
• Sample data - since we now have a 'purge' function, we are building lots of sample data to show new users what can be done with VIP Professional.
• Other: We've also tweaked a few other features, fixed some bugs, and so on. More details will be available in our release notes once we formally release the next version.

Take a peek at some of the nightlife news and tips we have happening at our industry blog: Focus on Nightlife.

Today's entry gives some pointers on guest list management and how you can really drive revenues by minimizing reservation errors and gathering important contact information from your customers.

We hope Focus on Nightlife, working in conjunction with VIP Professional, will give industry leaders the upper-hand in such a competitive market. Feel free to send us comments/suggestions regarding Focus on Nightlife or Stratogistics Inc. and let us know what kind of content you would find helpful.

Our latest update, released on 04 June 2008, adds the ability for you to export any report to PDF format.

To use the feature, simply click on the 'Export to PDF' button on the toolbar of the Print Previewer:

This will pop up a standard 'save file' dialog. Select the directory where you want to save the file, give it a unique name (or accept the default name), and that is it.

While VIP Professional already supported PDF reports for notifications and confirmations / reminders, this 'Export to PDF' feature allows you to manually generate PDF reports without having to use a notification. This is mainly useful in two situations:

1. When you want to manually email the report to someone (rather than use a notification).
2. When you want to save copies of all reports in an 'archive' directory (for example, to have a 'printed' copy of booking reports saved into each client's directory).

We hope you find the feature handy. If you have any suggestions on additional features -big or small- don't hesitate to let us know!

We've been getting a lot of great feedback on the merge codes available in VIP Professional. Clearly, merge codes are a very, very popular feature.

We are planning on dramatically expanding the range and scope of merge codes available to you -- and to making them even more flexible. Some of what we are working on includes:

• Building in an import / export capability. This is a highly requested feature and one we've had in our development 'roadmap' for a long time. This will allow us to post new templates for you, of course, but more importantly it means that you can use 3rd-party templates (sharing those from other users, from your designers, and ones we created).
• Adding support for functions. For example, an 'if' function would allow you to say "if the Reservation Type is a 'Private Party' insert some party-related text, otherwise insert some other, generic, text". Another function might allow you to control the formatting of information (such as a date), or to filter the information in a listing (such as inserting a listing of reservations that have more than 30 guests). Functions will dramatically change the way you can use VIP Professional's notifications and confirmations / reminders. What is already a strong marketing tool will become even more capable - stay tuned on this one; we think you'll like it!
• Adding support for snippets -- pieces of text that you can create (including more merge codes, if desired) that are inserted by the merge code. For example, you might create a snippet to be used as the footer for every message you create. This allows you to update all the footers in all of your templates by making a single change, in one place. Another snippet might have sales blurbs that can be used in multiple message templates. And so on.
• Adding more 'summary' merge codes -- we get a lot of positive feedback about how much you like being able to create your own reports interactively and having them automatically circulated. We're looking to add a lot more functionality to the summary codes.
• And much more -- there's a lot to do!

There is no timeline on any of the above yet. Once we're close, we'll announce more details.

What merge-related features interest you? What would you like us to add? Let us know -- your feedback would be very much welcomed.

Well, the new website is up and running! Or, sort of... still some tweaking to be done (including on this blog!) and the order processing isn't ready. Everything else is good-to-go, though! That's encouraging.

We will be adding content regularly, such as new product tours. Next month, we're also hoping to start posting some handy templates for the Notifications System and the Confirmations / Reminders System.

Feedback on the website is always welcomed - feel free to drop us a line.