Their first workshop in Santa Barbara, California was a HUGE success!  ”We loved keeping the workshop small so that each attendee’s business was able to be discussed and we could spend quality time with each photographer in regards to camera settings, lighting discussion and other important day of wedding details” – Sara Kauss.

Sara Kauss (http://sarakauss.com) and Josh Newton (http://joshnewton.com) have teamed up to create the ultimate in a wedding workshop.  Faux/Tographers is more than just a training session, it’s a hands-on experience for new photographers looking to get into wedding photography.  Check out their website for more details:  http://faux-tographers.com (and don’t forget the dash!)

Here’s a couple testimonials from their first workshop:

“I had such a blast with you guys… My mind cant stop spinning!” – Matthew Cotter

“I really enjoyed hearing your stories of how you started your businesses.  It was so encouraging and inspiring to hear your ‘beginnings’ and to see where you are today – INCREDIBLE! Overall, I am so encouraged about the photography profession as a whole and just wanted to thank you both for sharing your time and talent with the workshop group!” – Lisa De Jager

“I had an awesome time at the fauxtographers workshop in Santa Barbara. It was so great to be able to work closely with successful photographers and learn what steps they take on a wedding day, and other aspects of the business.” – Jamie Hudson

What are you waiting for! Visit their site and reserve your ticket today!

We’re looking for a few subscribers to help us review the change by logging in to a special testing server and verifying that everything is exactly the same as it is in production. If you have some time to spare this weekend and would like to volunteer, please email team@tave.com. Seats are limited. Due to the need to be familiar with the current production system, trial accounts are not eligible and Lifetime subscribers will have priority seating.

We know testing to make sure everything is exactly the same as before is a bit dull, so as a reward, active volunteers will be the first to be invited to test and review future (and far more exciting!) pre-releases.

Update: Wow, we didn’t expect so much interest! If you’re chosen to participate, you’ll receive an email from beta-announce@tave.com with instructions when we’re ready to get started (probably early tomorrow). Requests to volunteer will still be considered up until then.

Update 2: The beta signup is now closed and all seats filled. Thank you to all of our volunteers, you rock!

Update 3: We released 2.9.0 and are now at 2.9.2 (as seen at the bottom of the page inside the app). A few hiccups, but overall a great release!

We’ll be removing the option from the website on Thursday (March 4th) when we leave for WPPI 2010.

If you’re attending WPPI, you’ll have a few more days as we’ll be offering the lifetime subscriptions in person on the show floor while supplies last.  The lifetime subscription will not be discounted or prorated at the show and we’ll only have a few to offer, so your best bet is to buy online this week.

If you aren’t attending WPPI, then you have just a few days left to take advantage of the unbeatable lifetime subscription option!

Visit our booth at the WPPI trade show in Las Vegas, March 8th – 10th, to take the new Táve 3.0 for a spin yourself.

Visit tave.com for more info and to sign-up for our Táve 3.0 newsletter.

As a reminder; since Táve is a web-based system, all accounts are always up-to-date with the latest fixes and releases at no additional cost.   So if you subscribe now, your account will be automatically upgraded once Táve 3.0 is released.

We’ve called it a game changer.

We’ve talked about a few of the new features, such as the advanced new quoting system, the unlimited questionnaires, an amazing new address book, a fresh new look, and streamlining everywhere.

But all that is only the beginning of what’s new in the most powerful studio management system, reimagined.

Lifetime Subscriptions now start at $995

Additional user accounts on the lifetime plan are just $200 each.

If you bought a lifetime subscription and have fewer than 5 employees, we’re going to refund the difference.  Yeah, we’re cool like that.

If you have an active monthly or annual subscription and your term isn’t over yet, we’re now prorating any unused pre-paid time you have and applying it to the lifetime subscription, so it’ll actually be cheaper than $995 for you.  Click here to see the rate for your studio.

Limited Time Only

The lifetime option isn’t going to stick around forever, so be sure to upgrade now.

This is a very different type of workshop from your usual photography workshop. “For the Love” is designed as an All-Inclusive retreat with the benefits of photography workshop. If you are longing for a break from the stress and a place for inspiration, then you should consider coming to “For the Love”.  This workshop will renew your mind, refresh your spirit, rejuvenate creativity, and open your eyes to new ways of seeing things.  You will remember why you signed up for this amazing career.  You will remember that it was all for the love…the love of God…the love of life…the love of creativity…the love of photography.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, please make sure you visit the For the Love website and see if this workshop is right for you!

If you’ve pulled up a job profile in the past couple days you may have noticed something new in the conversation module…

Each job now has a dedicated email address that lets you send emails directly to the profile from any email client by adding the email address as a BCC to an email to your client or simply forwarding an email that your client sent you.

Once you send an email to the BCC address, you should be able to pull it up again directly inside your email application based on the job name.

You can also go to settings and click on the “vCard Job BCC Addresses” link (or the combined export) in the yellow box on the right.  As with all vCard imports, we suggest importing the contacts into their own folder/group to make it easier to manage them later. Once imported, you’ll be able to pull up the BCC address directly from your email client without visiting Táve first.

Other Email Features

The email bcc feature is meant as a convenience and is not what we’ve been referring to as “Email Integration”.  Full email integration (with templates, themes, reply and bounce handling, auto replies, parsing, etc) is still coming in a future release.

This feature was created outside of our normal development process so we could get it out there quickly (since we’ve had many requests for it) without having to wait for the next big release…

Our Next Releases are Game Changers

We’ve mentioned that Questionnaires (our top requested feature) is very close to rolling out, but we’re going to hold back for a bit and merge it into the next release.

Why?

Two main reasons.  First, we don’t want to change Client Access that much in the middle of what is a busy holiday season for many of our studios, and second, our Questionnaires go so far beyond anything available today that we expect a huge surge in new users, and that’s not something we want just yet.

Wait, what?!?!

We’re doing some amazing things right now.  Some of the upgrades are so impressive and so massive, that many won’t even recognize the application when they stop by our booth at WPPI in March, that’s how huge the next few months are going to be for us.  We’re improving the way you work, the way things are organized, and the speed at which you can work.  More emphasis is being put on jobs; from the way client access is set up and managed to the way you create and propose quotes.  We’re making the whole application more intuitive, the workflow faster and far more flexible, and a whole lot easier to start using from the get go.  Not to mention, we’re adding the most requested features from our users like Questionnaires, Email Integration, and more.

So even though it’ll remain fairly quiet on the Táve front for a bit longer, know that it’s because of some truly revolutionary improvements coming up.

Our new name.  We’re now simply Táve and no longer Táve Studio Manager.  Sure, the old name was descriptive, but there’s no other Táve and with such a unique name, who needs to be descriptive?

New Client And Job profiles and editors. We completely reworked the way you view and edit clients and jobs.  Instead of going right into big bulky editors, you view a concise profile with just the relevant facts.  This also let us add useful links, for instance you can click on an address to view it in Google Maps, or click on the directions link to get directions from your studio’s address (configurable in Settings), telephone numbers will open Skype or any other voice chat software you have installed and set to use the links, and you can just click the “export vCard” link in the title bar to quickly add the contact to Address Book or Outlook and later sync to your phone if desired.

You might notice we also added a filter control to the Clients home page.  The new Job editor also includes some miniature subject editors and a new control for attaching vendors and venues without leaving the page, even creating new ones!  You’ll be seeing more of this cool new control in the future.   If you’ve attached a vendor or venue to a job, they’ll show up in the event editor’s list of possible attendees.  Speaking of vendors, you can now upload attachments to vendors.

Custom Fields. You’ve long asked to be able to create your own fields for the various profiles, and now you can.   This is extremely flexible and you can add all sorts of fields to the client, subject, job, vendor, and vendor rep profiles.  Even better, you can include these fields on your contact forms, which now also supports drag-and-drop reordering, and include the client editable fields inside Client Access, as we’ve added client profile editing in Client Access.  If your client access settings previously had the option enabled to allow clients to edit their contact information (an option that was marked as coming soon previously), the new profile editor will show up automatically.  Speaking of Client Access…

Client Access Preview. Users frequently wanted to see what their clients were seeing on their client access pages, doing so required setting a password for them and remembering to reset everything afterwards.  That was particularly ineffective if you wanted to see something like the payment page.  No more!  Head on over to the client profile page and you’ll see that the orange Client Access box now has a preview link.   Click the link and you’ll get a new window with their session.  The bar at the top includes a menu of the key pages inside their Client Access portal, so you can use it to jump directly from page to page without affecting the client at all.

Job Printouts. The new job profile viewer includes a Print button.  Click it and you can fine-tune the information you want included depending on if you’re printing it for your physical record keeping or to keep with you on the day of the job.  This printout is meant to contain all the critical aspects of the job, including attendee contact info, event locations, call notes, internal notes, financial transactions, and custom fields.    That’s just the start, as we plan to offer other types of printouts in the future, as requested in Idea Bank.

Calendar improvements include an improved Heads Up Display system which allow the HUDs to stay open when your mouse is over them, so you can now click on events or jobs and even create new events or unavailable time directly from the HUDs. You’ll notice that you can also click on a day in the availability calendar to go directly to creating a new event. We also add tentative events to the availability calendar, which you can hide or show by clicking the link in above the calendar.

Helpful but smaller improvements include your browser’s history now showing the page title, instead of the application name for every page so you can easily go back without having to guess which page was where. We’ve added a passive anti-spam system to the contact forms to help limit lead spam, if you host your own contact form please see the release notes.

Release Notes

We updated much more than the major changes above, so here’s the full list:

• New name and website addresses.
• New public website.  Note that the login link is the right-most item in the navigation and takes you to a dedicated login page now.  We’re going to be adding testimonials to the homepage soon, so if you’d like to rave about Táve, send us a testimonial, logo, and photo.
• Changed the appearance of the main search field to make it more apparent and improving compatibility with Safari.
• Added additional details about the items needing attention on the home page.
• Added tentative events to the availability calendar with a hide/show toggle in the legend.
• Made days in the availability calendar clickable to create new events.
• Added links to the events and jobs as well as to quickly create a new event or unavailable time to the availability calendar HUDs.
• Added a filter menu to the Clients home.
• Added an icon to show the user has CA (Client Access) enabled.
• Added a client profile viewer.
• Added a vCard export link.
• Added a “Mark as lost” button to match the existing one for jobs, but applying to the client, cascading to all jobs.
• Previewing the amount a client can pay in CA and explaining why it may not be the full balance.
• Linking addresses to Google Maps and adding a directions link too.
• Linking telephone numbers to phone applications like Skype with the tel:// scheme.
• Added link to the previous and next events for the client.
• Showing the first and most recent job source for a client.
• Showing the last time the client accessed their CA profile, if ever, and how many pages they loaded.
• Added a “Allow profile editing?” per-client override.
• Added a preview link which opens a new window with the CA preview for the client.
• CA preview let’s you jump between pages inside the client’s portal.
• Notes are created inline more intuitively.
• Cleaned up the client editor.
• Allowing client profile editing in Client Access if enabled in the page’s settings.
• Added job profile viewer.
• All changes on both profile viewers happen live.
• Emails and phone numbers in the client/subject HUDs are now clickable.
• Added a Print button, which allows you to configure a new all-in-one job printout, optionally showing financial details, internal notes, conversation logs, and call/event descriptions.
• Created a new “Token editor”, which lets you search, add, and create new items live.
• Created a new “live editor”, used by the token editor to quickly edit items without leaving the current page.  Expect much more use of this in the future.
• Using the token editor to create and/or attach vendors and venues to the job.
• Added quick entry forms for subjects so you no longer have to leave the editor to add subjects.
• Including any vendors attached to the job as possible attendees in the event editor.
• Updated the Product Option editor to behave similar to other editors in the application.
• Corrected currency symbol use in the Products section.
• Improved the logic used to hide/show tasks based on the status of the deliverable or job.
• Added attachments to the vendor editor.
• Added vCard export links to vendors and vendor reps.
• Fixed issue with the Helpdesk link reloading the application if your last login was a while ago.
• Added an address book vCard export to Settings (not all third-party applications support multi-contact vCards).  Use this link to export all your contacts to Address Book on Mac and sync to your phone to have your client’s info appear when they call you.
• Added a credit card authorization form in case you’d rather not use PayPal to pay for Táve.
• Added Custom Profile Fields, which can be configured as various different types of fields (date, dropdown, text field, text box), apply to different items inside Táve (clients, subjects, jobs, vendors, vendor reps), and customize the appearance and permissions for Client Access.
• Added drag and drop reordering to the Custom Profile Fields list so you can change tho order they appear throughout the application.
• Added the new Custom Profile Fields to the contact form editor when they apply to clients, defaulting them to hidden.
• Added drag and drop reordering of all contact form fields.
• Removing Táve branding and links from the new lead email and adding a reply-to so you can more easily reply directly to new leads.
• Added a passive anti-spam system to contact forms (if you host your contact form on your own site and post to us, let us know so we can disable this for your studio, as your users will receive a session error and will be told to try again).
• Added a few dynamic fields to contracts in case you wish to have items like the client’s name or job date in your contract text.
• Improved the birthday field behavior and international date handling.
• Preventing double form submit.
• Improved the display of errors in a form on submit.
• Increased overall database performance.
• Added support for Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 8 native-mode support (if you use IE7, we strongly encourage you to apply the IE8 windows update).

You’ll find the episode in iTunes or on the TWiP episode notes page, which includes a summarized transcript.  Now you’ll all have first hand knowledge of just how big of a nerd I am, if I sound a bit too upbeat, it’s probably due to all the diet Mt Dew I’ve been downing in the lead up to this weekend’s long anticipated software update.

I ended up talking a lot about all of you and completely forgot to mention how much more affordable we are than the competition and all the other cool things we do!  So please, help us spread the word!

A quick correction: I briefly mentioned the history of Táve and said that the name Táve is derived from a foreign phrase.  To be precise, Táve is a completely original mark and term both in the spelling (with the accent) and pronunciation (tah-vay).

Themes

Contact Forms

Separate brands; separate pages

Up Next…

Now you have access to your studio’s info while you’re out in the field with the first and only photo studio management software designed specifically for the iPhone!

Just visit http://www.tave.com on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android browser, and you’ll be greeted by a fast-loading login page.   Enter your user information and you’ll have your studio access right at your finger tips!

This first version is a streamlined viewer meant to load quickly even if you’re on a weak cellular connection.

Click on a phone number to call it or click on an address to get direction there from your phone’s Google Maps application!

Along with the new release, we’ve unveiled our new website and opened up registration to anybody who qualifies with a 30-day free trial.

Within moments of registration, you’ll have access to Táve Studio Manager and the new iPhone Access application.   After the 30-day trial period, it’s only $25/month!   That’s half the price of most of our online competitors and way less than the legacy software applications.

Best of all, we’re still busy working on all sorts of exciting new features that will be released soon.  Our philosophy is to release early and release often, so instead of sitting on new features for big product releases, you’ll continue to see constant upgrades almost every week!

This release includes several new reports and the addition of 3d charts to make it easier to visualize how your studio is doing financially and where your work is coming from.  All of the reports can be customized for different date ranges or filtered to considering only specific job types.

The Income Report charts your accounts receivable, breaking it down by either the event date or payment date, allowing you to quickly see your financial position.

The various Booking Trends reports show you your booking rate, lead rate, and income broken down by job type or lead source.

Finally, the new Top Performers reports include various “Top 20″ lists, like your most profitable clients, job types, lead sources, and products.   Broken down by when they were booked or the main job/event date.

Today we’re adding three third-party application security audit certifications, as you’ll now see at the bottom of the public tavestudio.com homepage:

These third-parties regularly audit us to verify we’re secure and encrypting traffic.

We’ll be adding additional independent certificates soon.

Update (8/2/08):

We’ve added an Extended Validation certificate to our application, which means you’ll now see the “green bar” of a trusted site in Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 3:

Accordingly, we’ve also updated the login panel, including the latest information: