By popular demand — event planners can now see their colleagues’ events as well.
By default, the My Events page will show you the events you’re running — now you’ll see a toggle that will show you all the events at your company and who’s planning them, ordered by date.
Enjoy!
We’re getting 2009 going with a bang with two big announcements: Public Profiles and open registration for event planners.
First, let’s talk about Public Profiles. This is a terrific new feature that allows TDs to have a public link to their schedule and profile.
If your name is… Richard Pryor, for example, you can have a link to your profile page that looks like:
www.staffreservations.com/public/RichardPryor
You can send this link to any planner you work with. They can bookmark it and anytime they want to check your schedule they can go to your page. Planners don’t have to sign in — they don’t even need an account at all! Feel free to add this link to your Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or LinkedIn pages.
Of course, this is an optional step. We’ve left it turned off by default to respect your privacy. To turn it on, log in to the site and then go to My Account. You’ll see a new field called Public Profile Name. In most cases you can just type your name (no spaces please, and upper/lowercase doesn’t matter) and then click the Update Account button. Presto! Your new public page is ready to go! If you ever change your mind, just blank the field and your public page will vanish.
The other big news is open registration for event planners. We’ve opened up the site so that any event planner can now register for a free beta account with five seats. That means any of the planners you work with now have an even bigger reason to check us out! Spread the news — the more users we have the better the site will get.
We hope you think public profiles are as cool as we do, and keep spreading the word to the event planners you work with!
Best wishes for a great (and busy!) 2009!
=StaffReservations=
Happy Thanksgiving!
Now that the last of the turkey has made it into the last of the turkey salad sandwiches, it’s time to roll out another great feature: NOTES!
Available only for premium users, the new notes feature lets any planner at your company enter notes for a TD that are visible to all planners at your company. You can enter general notes, or, enter a note that applies to a specific past event. This second type of note is great for when you’re doing your post-trip review. Anyone can enter post-trip notes while the information is fresh in one’s memory, and then later print out or review all post-trip notes with the team. (Or, for annual events, a new planner can review which staff did well last year, and which ones didn’t do as well.)
Some small improvements for TDs entering their own events.
What do you think? Should canceled events even be displayed at all? Or would you rather have the option to turn it on and off?
Also, caught a bug in the update event page where a date update would error out — this has been fixed.
Over the weekend we added the ability for an event planner admin user to reassign events from one planner to another, as well as some other minor enhancements: icons on the My Events page have been made bigger and nicer, and we’ve added pagination to the My Favorites list.
Keep those ideas coming!
Need to send ops manuals to your staff? Need to let them know about last minute changes? Now you can email your staff for a given event quickly and easily. Click on the envelope icon next to the event name on your Events page. You can dash off a note to all of your confirmed staff, and even attach up to three files.
As a TD, the profile editing screen allows you to enter in all kinds of information about yourself. What an event planner actually sees when browsing TD profiles is this information, presented slightly differently. Now you can see what they see by clicking the “Event Planner View” button on the top right corner of the My Profile page. Check it out!
We’ve been hard at work getting new features off the drawing board and on to the site; some were planned for a while, and some have come up as a result of your suggestions.
And we’ve got more stuff in the hopper, stay tuned!