Not even going to burden myself with the “must update blog” guilt-trip-in-waiting, but I will try to cover off why we’ve been rather intermittent. It’s not that we’re not busy, far from it, we’re about as busy as we’ve ever been and that, I guess, is the problem. Yes, we should be spending time marketing, tweeting, writing news stories and letting you know what we’ve been up to… but there’s barely enough time in the day to get the core development work done, let alone all that promotional stuff.

Not great business practice, I guess, but I’ll let you be the judge when you see what we have achieved since the last update.

• We moved offices from one side of the UK to the other. A fairly big move, brought about by personal circumstances, but we’re now in what must be one of the nicest offices around (the photo above is the view I have from my desk)
• We’ve added the ability for prospective clients to trial the system, use it and see whether it fits for them.
• We’ve added a new management layer that sits above each event system, tying them together with client control over adding, archiving and upgrading systems.
• We’ve made the address books work across the whole account (rather than being independent for each event), which means that each contact need only be supplied once and changes to a contact are reflected wherever they are used.
• The new management layer also means that we can now share contracts and boilerplate documents, accommodation hotels and rooms, stage details and more.
• We’ve added the ability to “hibernate” your account, so that you can put your account to bed when you’ve finished for the year and, whilst hibernating, receive a 50% discount on any subscription fees.
• We’ve added additional subscription levels so that it makes it clearer for clients to select the payment plan that fits their needs.
• We’ve redesigned the Volunteer module so that it’s easier to use for applicants.
• We’ve rebuilt the graphical Scheduler so that the system can now cope with festivals that run over multiple weeks.
• We’ve added a completely new Support and Help system
• We’ve rebuilt the Permission and Security modules so that they’re easier to understand and use.
• We’ve added a new Dashboard so that you can see instantly what’s going on and where.

We have got a new twitter a/c, which we’re using for help, support and upgrade notices. We’ve written a series on How to Manage Your Festival, more of which in future posts, and there’s a complete marketing plan in existence.

And we’re not finished yet.

Here’s the development/project list for the next few months. More than enough to keep us busy.