Happy new year, everyone!

I hope you all had a good 2009 (despite the horrible economy) and hopefully will have a fantastic 2010.

We've got lots of big plans for 2010 -- including lots of new functionality for VIP as well as an entirely new product.

Stay tuned!

If you haven't experimented with it yet, take a closer look at VIP Professional's Views feature.

Views allow you to fully customize the display for just about any grid-type listing in VIP Professional. You can choose what columns to display, the default sort order, whether or not to group columns, how wide columns are, what font and colors are used, and dozens more characteristics.

This isn't just about appearances -- Views can completely change how you work with VIP Professional. For example, you can have a View in the Reservations Manager that shows you the core details about your reservations. Another View might focus on financial details. Another might focus on the operational details. And so on. You can have as many Views as you want and easily toggle between them depending on what you need to do at that moment.

Also, many reports in VIP Professional are based on the current View -- essentially, any of the pre-defined reports that have "(Dynamic)" in its name is based on the current View (as well as the current Filter). Thus, if you are looking at the Reservations Manager, the Reservations Listing Report (Dynamic) will generate a report that uses the same columns, column order, fonts, and so on as shown on the screen. That's a handy way of getting completely different reports quickly and easily.

VIP Professional comes with many Views pre-defined for you. However, you can easily create your own Views or customize the ones we've provided. Just open the Views Lookup by clicking the lookup button next to the drop-down listing:

That displays the Views Lookup:

Then either create a new View or edit an existing one:

Experiment with the View editor a bit to see what it can do. The main thing to keep in mind is that each column can have its own settings. Plus, there are many settings that apply to the overall View. Try different settings and see how they work together -- they are very powerful and very flexible. You can do a lot with them.

Also, keep in mind that Views can be Public or Private.

A Public View is available to all of your users. A Private View is available just to the person who 'owns' that View (the user to whom the View is assigned). This is very handy as it allows different users to have Views that suit their own personal needs, without cluttering up the View lists of other users (simply by setting personal Views to "Private"). Yet you can also share important or standard Views with all users (simply be setting standard Views to "Public").

The #1 factor affecting the priority we place on the development of new features / functionality in VIP Professional is the feedback we receive from our users. We take your feedback very seriously -- if you have suggestions or ideas on VIP Professional, please let us know. We will do our best to address it for you.

And, of course, if you encounter any bugs or functionality problems while using VIP Professional please let us know. We can't fix it if we don't know about it!

Quick Tip: Whenever a reservation is saved (with any Status other than 'Tentative'), a unique Reservation Code is automatically generated.

This code can be included via merge codes in confirmation / reminder emails or used internally by your management team when referring to reservations.

For promoters and nightlife venue operators, a common task is to track 'house lists' -- sets of guests typically coming from a single source (a sub-promoter, for example) and usually all receiving similar admission perks, etc.

VIP Professional makes it easy to manage your house lists. Simply set up a standard reservation for each house list, omit the Organizer (or set it to the name of the promoter), and assign 'House List' as the Reservation Type.

Then just add guests to that reservation as needed.

Some tips:

• Use the Source / Tracking Code functionality to easily allow you to distinguish house lists from different sources. For example, set the Source to 'Sub-Promoter' and the Tracking Code to a unique code that identifies the sub-promoter. That allows you to run reports based on who the sub-promoter was -- allowing you to see trends involving that sub-promoter.
• Create a Confirmation / Reminder template specifically for your house lists. Since the guests in a house list usually don't know each other, the confirmation / reminder message normally needs to be worded a bit differently than you'd use for a 'normal' reservation.

Creating a custom report in VIP Professional is easy with the recently added "Custom Reports Builder" feature.

The Custom Reports Builder allows you to create report templates that you can save and then use just as you would any other report within VIP Professional - even attaching them to notifications.

To access the Custom Reports Builder, select it from the File menu:

This will open the lookup list of custom reports. Click the Add button to open the Custom Report Builder itself.

General information about the report template is shown at the top of the dialog. This is where you can specify the report template's name, its scope ('Private' if it is only for the assigned user, 'Public' if it is for all users), the type of the report, etc.

The Report Type allows you to choose either Tabular (rows and columns that are pre-defined), Dynamic (rows and columns based on the current grid settings), and Sectional (a report built from one or more pre-defined sections).

The Page Setup tab contains settings affecting the page orientation, size, and margins.

The Header / Footer tab contains settings for both a header and a footer that will appear on every page of the report. You have full control over the formatting of the header and footer.

TIP - right-click on one of the header / footer fields to see a list of merge codes you can insert into the field to generate dynamic text. For example, you can include the current user's name in the header / footer - this gets updated whenever the report is run to show the current user at that time. Additional merge codes and pre-defined headers / footers are available from the drop-down menu associated with each field.

The Report Title tab contains settings for an optional report title. As with headers / footers, you can right-click on a field to display a context menu of available merge codes.

The Content tab contains the details on what, exactly, you want to include in your report template. This tab changes depending on what Report Type you've selected in the top section of the dialog.

You can click on the Preview button to see what your reports will look like with the current settings:

Once you are satisfied with your report template, click "OK" to save it.

Now, any time you want to run the report, you can select it from the Print menu (though the report will only be listed if it is available for the current module -- if you are looking at the Reservation Editor, you won't see a custom report showing you all the guests in the guest directory!).

And that's it! We hope you find the Custom Reports Builder handy. If you have feedback on this feature, or suggestions on how we can make it better, please let us know.

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.