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.

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.