Táve

Táve 3.0.8 Released with Client Portal, Direct Contracting, and enhanced iframe support

Adrian Ziemkowski — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:33:40 +0000

Last week we released Táve 3.0.8, which adds several frequently requested features and usability improvements.

Client Portal

The new Client Portal mimics “Client Access” from Táve 2, by providing a password protected page for your clients that links to all the available pages for them. Unlike Táve 2, this is a completely optional route to book your clients. One of the most useful benefits of using the portal is that you can link to your portal from your own website. It also adds a profile editor so your client can update some of their own contact information. The pros and cons of using the Client Portal are detailed in this Helpdesk article.

With this came a new client overview page, which summarizes your open or future interaction with a contact similar to how the Job Overview works. Here’s an example featuring Karen and my beautiful long haired miniature dachshund, Maya.

Sales Order Receipts

Another client-facing improvement with this week’s release is a new sales order receipt page. The new page includes the payment schedule, with both the payment history and future invoices shown. From here your client can print their order or pay an invoice. I used a demo studio brand that highlights the default client page layout.

New Sales Order and Invoice Printouts

This week’s release includes a completely new printout for sales orders and invoices. The new design is both much more readable and attractive than the old version, which was a holdover from Táve 2.

The line items in the order printout now match the display used throughout the application, including package items and descriptions. Note that we scale the invoice graphic down to fit in 300×150, but uploading an image up to 3 times the size will result in most users seeing a high resolution graphic when printed.

Direct Contracting

If you’ve ever run into the situation where you need to have your client sign a contract, but they’ve already booked your proposal, direct contracting is the solution! Now you can add a contract to a job to be signed at any time separate from proposals.

Just head to the Job’s contract page and select the contract to add. In case your contract uses placeholders, you’ll need to select the contact who will be receiving the contract request as well as which order the contract should reference.

From there send your client the link and they’ll be able to sign the contract any time.

Website Inlining for

Some of you use Brands as if they were themes in order to embed your contact form on your existing website with an while still having a full version for booking using another brand. The problem here is that you have to remember to switch the brand after they contact you, and that’s both tedious and error prone. Luckily, that’s a think of the past!

Now, just use the one brand and use a special URL when embedding your contact form (or Client Portal, public questionnaire, etc). You just use a modified version of your secure URL that includes “-inline” in it, which adds a special class to the tag, which means you can customize that look even more using the Brand’s Advanced CSS Editor.

If you’re interested in doing this, the instructions are here on the Helpdesk.

The Latest on Táve 3 Early Access

Adrian Ziemkowski — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:50:18 +0000

We continue to work our way toward General Availability and have released over 140 new features and fixes since Early Access was opened up to everybody a little over a month ago. We wanted to take a moment to highlight a few of those changes since Early Access launched.

The job viewer has a new Orders page

Several of the recent changes have been to reduce the number of clicks to get at the information you’re looking for (and many more of those on the way!). One of the most noticeable is that we got rid of the Invoices page in the job viewer and rewrote the Orders page, which now includes the invoices and payment history grouped by order.

The job lists are now sortable

With Táve 2 you had to sort and filter your job list yourself and hopefully arrive at the information you’re looking for. With Táve 3 we went the opposite direction by creating separate pre-made highly purposed lists to make it super simple to get at what you’re looking for, whether you’re looking for who owes you money or which leads need proposals still.

A few of the lists make sense being sorted several different ways and it generally comes down to a matter of how you work or how large the list is. Because of that, we’ve brought custom sorting to the job list in Táve 3. Just click any column title to change the list sorting.

Hovering your mouse over the title of the current sort column will show you the current sort order. Clicking the current column a second time will reverse the sort.

As part of this process we also cleaned up the lists themselves a bit, adding the “Expired Proposals” list and correcting some columns (like the “Client Activity” column in the various lead lists) and adding others (such as a new “Payment Due” date column in the “With Balances” list).

New “Mail Activity Log” and changes to the default email layout

Today’s 3.0.7 Early Access release includes several new features for email. To help improve the spam scores of email sent through Táve, we updated the default email layout to move your brand’s email logo to the bottom of the message rather than the top. We’ve also started including a text version of your messages in outgoing emails to further improve the score. In addition, we wrote a short spam tips article in the helpdesk.

The most exciting email update in this release though is the new Mail Activity Log in the Reports section. This report shows a full list of email events, such as opens, clicks, or bounces, since we switched email providers last month.

The details with dashed lines under them have tooltips with technical information, which can often hint as to how the email is being handled even if they’re often rather technical.

We’ve also added a version of the report to the Job’s mail viewer. So if you’ve sent an email, you can access it from the job’s conversation log and get all the activity for just that one message.

Finally, if an email fails to deliver, such as the email bouncing or being reported as spam, we now send a notification email to the studio’s primary email address.

Improvements to the “Offline Payments” page

While this is a relatively minor change in itself, it is on a client facing page that may affect you so we wanted to bring it up here. The offline payment instructions were previously displayed below a sentence describing the payment to be sent. Many of you wanted to customize that sentence as well.

So now instead of the amount and due date being inside a highly variable dynamic sentence, they’re simply labeled “Amount Due” and “Due Date”. To hide or style those details, you or your web designer can use the Brand’s “Advanced Editor” to edit the CSS using the body.payOffline #PaymentInfo {} selector.

Lots of new tutorials

Karen has been creating a lot of new tutorials on the helpdesk.

They’re always just a click away by clicking the Support link at the top right of Táve 3 any time.

Stability improvements

Many of the changes we released over the past month have been bug fixes and the Early Access system continues to stabilize more and more every day as we respond to helpdesk tickets and work toward implementing some of the top requested features.

Thank you for your patience as we continue to work through the 3.0 release and especially those of you who have filed helpdesk tickets (bonus points for urls and screenshots!) or joined us in our helpdesk’s public chatroom.

Táve 3.0 Early Access Now Available to All Existing Users

Adrian Ziemkowski — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:58:53 +0000

This is a quick note for our Táve 2 users: You probably noticed a large Táve 3.0 Early Access banner on the left side of the application. Clicking on the banner will take you to the 3.0 migration website, where you’ll be able to configure a preview migration or go live with the new version. Once the migration is complete, you’ll be able to sign-in to the new Táve 3.0 Early Access site at my.tave.com.

Thank you for your patience and support as we worked long and hard to develop Táve 3!

Registration Closed for 3.0 Rollout

Adrian Ziemkowski — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:57:58 +0000

Táve 2.9 registration has been closed for the 3.0 rollout.

3.0 registration will begin on the evening of Wednesday, February 8th.

If you don’t have an existing account, please sign-up for our newsletter to receive an email when Táve 3.0 registration begins.

Updated (2/8): Registration has resumed, so register now and take your 30-day free trial for a spin!

Advisory: GMail users, emails may be marked as spam

Jason Pirkey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:17:37 +0000

We’ve received several reports of studios who use GMail not seeing new lead emails due to GMail marking the email as Spam. While unconfirmed, it’s possibile that emails sent from studios via Táve to GMail recipients may be affected by this issue as well. This issue affects both Táve 2 and 3.

Our outgoing mail has been independently verified to pass all anti-spam checks, including SPF, DKIM, and SpamAssassin, so we believe this to be an isolated issue with GMail.

Workaround: While we work to resolve the issue, GMail users should add a rule in their GMail settings to never mark email coming from @tave.com as spam (and we suggest having it mark the message as important). Also, check your Táve daily for new leads as they will always show up there even if the email notice doesn’t reach you.

RESOLVED (1/25):Our outgoing email is now using new IP addresses and our test emails have been delivered successfully. Please comment or post a Helpdesk ticket if a new lead message goes to your spam or isn’t delivered after 2PM Eastern today (Wednesday, January 25th).

UPDATE (1/30): The issue appears to still exist for some studios, with some users now receiving the messages and others still having them marked as spam or undelivered. We continue to investigate and are working with our email service provider for a solution. Please see the workaround in the meantime.

RESOLVED (2/6): We’ve changed email providers and are now using the same provider as companies such as Foursquare and Hoot Suite.

Táve 3 “Early Access” rollout begins!

Adrian Ziemkowski — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 01:37:58 +0000

The holidays brought with them some major Táve 3 developments!

Those of you following @TaveStudio on Twitter may have seen that we launched our first Táve 3 studio on Monday. Of course my lovely wife and extremely talented Karen Lisa was the first to make the jump. We look forward to many new Táve 3 tutorials from her soon!

Since Monday, we’ve launched 5 more studios. Once these studios report that they’re all set up and actively using the system without any show stoppers, we’ll start inviting the rest of our 75 beta studios to go live with 3.0 “Early Access” as well. Then, once those studios have upgraded and report the same success and we have the system better documented, we’ll begin sending invitations out to existing Táve 2 subscribers to preview or upgrade their accounts. After that calms down we’ll put together a new public website and open up direct registration to Táve 3.

We’re calling it “Early Access” and rolling it out in stages because there’s still some important work to be done (such as mobile access), testing to be done (we haven’t done much testing outside of Google’s Chrome browser), and the 3.0 documentation is very limited. But even so, Táve 3 has advanced to the point that we believe it’s the better version for most of our users, especially considering all the amazing new features! Since we’ve designed the upgrade system to be user controlled and provide a way to preview your account in Táve 3, it makes sense to provide access earlier than if we had to meet the needs of all of our users at once for a system-wide simultaneous upgrade.

How long until everybody is invited to upgrade? That depends on how well each one of the steps outlined above goes, so there’s no way to say for sure, but we’re striving to get it out as quickly as possible. We’ll keep our Twitter account and Facebook page updated with the latest progress, so follow them if you want the latest details as we go. When you’re invited, we’ll send an email to your studio’s email address listed in Táve 2. If you don’t have a Táve 2 account, sign up for our Táve 3 newsletter on our homepage so you’re emailed when general registration is opened.

I try to include previews in our blog posts, but in celebration of the 3.0 Early Access release, why not check out an actual live Táve 3 demo questionnaire I created using the default brand theme?

Have a happy new year!

Maintenance: Wednesday @ 11PM EST (Completed)

Adrian Ziemkowski — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:58:36 +0000

Update: The migration was completed successfully. We were down for maintenance for just over an hour, about one third of our scheduled window. If you encounter any issues, please file a helpdesk ticket.

We’ll be moving from our servers based in Dallas, Texas, to Amazon’s AWS cloud starting at 11pm EST (Click the link to view the time in major cities around the globe). This will be a 3-hour window, but we’re aiming to have the system back online within an hour.

This blog and files uploaded by users in Táve 2.9 are already in the AWS cloud and every piece of the Táve 3.0 beta has been in AWS from the start as well. Wednesday’s migration completes our transition by moving the remaining 2.9 infrastructure. We’d wait until after the 3.0 release, but having 2.9 on AWS before then will dramatically speed up the studio-initiated upgrade system and also makes it easier for us to maintain both systems, as they’ll now have similar infrastructure behind them.

If this migration announcement seems familiar, you may recall we had planned on migrating back in March but postponed it due to an issue with Amazon’s email services. That has been resolved and in fact the new email service provider means we can now send emails from your studio without listing Táve as the Sender in Táve 3.0.

Táve 3.0 Preview: Client Access in Beta 5

Adrian Ziemkowski — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:18:52 +0000

With our final and largest beta being readied for release to our beta testers, today’s 3.0 preview post will be longer than usual as Beta 5 covers a lot of ground.

Beta 5 is all about the client facing items. Proposals, questionnaires, invoices, and contact forms are all added or recreated with this release. Client Access as it was in T2 is no more. With T3, clients access items directly, be it an invoice, a questionnaire, or a proposal. With this, Brands become much more important and far more powerful.

In T3, your public look and feel, your contact information, and even custom domains are all determined by the brand. As part of this, we’ve added more color and image settings, including separate email and printout graphics (as well as container HTML for emails and printouts in the advanced configuration page).

With these options you can easily create highly customized pages without ever touching the advanced configuration page. With the exception of the invoice screenshot that illustrates how customizable the design is, all of the screenshots below use the default options. If you don’t provide a page background, we add a texture to your background color to make the page a bit less plain.

We had to change the proposal editor inside the app (compared to the prior version) to handle the additional features. The advantage of the new layout is we can show more information on the page.

When you hover over the recipient, several icons appear, including one to email an invitation to the recipient and another to open the direct link in another window. Using the Email Proposal button at the top, all of the recipients will be sent their own trackable direct link in an email you compose. Unlike T2, there isn’t a preview mode as that often caused confusion for users, instead we added a button to resets the statistics for the proposal. Clicking on the direct link icon pulls up the proposal either on your brand’s custom domain or its secure tave.com subdomain.

In this example proposal, I’ve provided two quotes, which are displayed along with my introduction (the order is customizable too, another new feature in T3). You’ll notice that the links showing the steps to book the proposal are now textual, allowing your brand to completely customize the look of them, a welcome change from T2 with its hard-coded Client Access navigation design. The orange colors in this Brand come from the default accent color seen in the first screenshot above.

The contact information below the page is all configured on the Brand as well. The screenshot above highlights two completely fictional quotes, one using a package and the other not. There’s an option to show individual package item prices as well as the package discount, but it isn’t enabled in this screenshot. Another new feature here is the ability for your client to explicitly decline a quote, which may provide more insight into what your client’s are looking for. The final item in the second quote, “Wedding Art Prints”, is followed by a description from the new product editor.

In the next screenshot, the client has selected the Gold Collection above and is prompted to select the payment schedule that works best for them. If you only added one payment schedule to the proposal they skip this step and continue on.

The subsequent pages are exactly what you’d expect, so I’ll skip them here, but the configuration for two of the steps are worth highlighting. Contracts have been improved with more explicit “initial here” boxes, many more placeholders, a copy of the sales order, and 1-4 signers (T2 was only 1 or 2, and it could only be set on the contract itself). Here’s a small clip from the Proposal’s contract editor, where you can configure those signatures and preview the quote based on which quote and payment schedule are selected.

The payment system in T3 has been enhanced to add an “Offline Cash Payments” option and you can now enable multiple payment options, so your client can select to mail you a check, pay with PayPal or Google Checkout, or use a credit card with your merchant account.

To illustrate just how customizable the new client facing pages are, here’s an invoice page using Karen’s brand design. When you or your workflow email an invoice to a client, they receive a direct link to this page.

There you have it, the highlights from the final Táve 3.0 beta!

Táve 3.0 Release Plan

With only a few small exceptions, like simplifying the new New Lead Wizard, this beta essentially brings us to feature complete status. That’s quite a milestone when you consider my very first code submission labeled as 3.0 was on November 2nd, 2009 (changelist 3009 and we’re on change 5960 now, though we did release 2.8 and 2.9 between then and now it still illustrates how nearly as many changes have gone into 3.0 as have gone into all prior releases combined).

We’ll be working out the details and scheduling of the public release over the next couple weeks and will post more details about that then.

Beta 5 update and 3.0 Previews

Adrian Ziemkowski — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:35:50 +0000

When we began work on Beta 5, our final beta, in early August, we were aiming for a 2 month release schedule. It appears we’ll be pretty close to that goal as we’re now down to 10 points for this iteration in our project plan (our points are averaging about one day). Beta 5 is extremely exciting, as it completely replaces our client facing pages from T2, bringing far more attractive default designs, superior browser compatibility, and many more features. We’ll go deeper into it in our Beta 5 preview in two weeks.

In the meantime, I’d like to illustrate how some of the fairly simple changes in T3 can have a huge impact on what you get out of the system, by sharing a preview of the new sidebars from the Jobs and Contacts homepages. The Job section opens with an overview highlighting revenue (including a small chart), jobs that need attention, upcoming payments, etc. The Contacts section however, which replaces the Clients and Vendors sections, is more of an address book and thus opens directly to your full contact list.

One of the things we’ve been hearing about in T2 is that it isn’t always easy to get to your open leads or booked jobs, check account balances, or export only certain items. With the new lists in T3, all of that and more is available with a quick click (filtering is no longer required). We’ve also added a few other useful features here, like being able to star jobs and contacts that you want to quickly access later, to allowing bulk changes to the items (such as deleting or completing multiple items at once).

We’ve mentioned in earlier posts how contacts in T3 can be re-used around the app, being a client here, a subject there, and a vendor on another job. These lists bring all that together. For instance, adding a contact as a vendor on a job automatically adds them to the vendors list, rather than having a separate Vendors section as we do in T2.

Speaking of organizing important items, we also replaced the “Attention Needed” box on the homepage, which had a tendency to get rather massive for busy studios by listing each item right there, with a new “Right Now” summarized snapshot of your studio that links various item counts to these new lists.

These screenshots were taken with my test studio, so your actual data will make more sense than mine.

In Closing

We’ve had mixed reaction to our preview posts, with some feeling reassured that we’re doing the right thing and on track but others feeling teased by them. So we’ve spent the last couple months (as we in hurricane country say) ”hunkered down” focused on development of this final beta, knowing that what everybody really wants (us included!) is the final T3 release announcement. Once Beta 5 completes the beta process, we intend to ramp up our communication significantly.

Until then, and as always, we’re available via Helpdesk. Thank you for your support!

Táve 3.0 Preview: New Product Editor

Adrian Ziemkowski — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:37:39 +0000

In our previous Táve 3.0 preview series post, we looked at the new workflow system. Moving the workflow into its own section meant we could clean up and simplify the product editor, which had always been a bit of a challenge for new users to really jump into. Now all the work to create when ordered and default expenses are completely separate from the product editor. This also means you can reuse the same product workflow for multiple products, saving even more time.

Options and add-ons can be added and edited directly on the product page now, and add-on pricing is now located in the add-on quick editor instead of being grouped with all the other product pricing configuration. These popup quick editors are also new to Beta 4, replacing the inline quick editors used throughout the application due to feedback from previous betas.

When it comes to editing the pricing of complex products, such as albums, it’s easier and clearer than ever. We’ve also optimized it to handle larger and more complex products much more efficiently than before.

Jason and I are excited about today’s substantial Beta 4 release for many reasons. One significant update includes a major upgrade to our javascript framework that speeds up initial load so much that we’ve removed the loading screen. Another reason I’m personally excited about Beta 4 is that it means my focus now moves to the client-facing products, which are the last major components to deliver before we hit feature-complete status across all products and start planning the Early Access release schedule.