Hi,
As we explore and refine the potential architecture approach for the Next Generation product, a key element is extensibility. The current Tessitura software provides a variety of ways for organizations to extend the software today, and we have heard loud and clear that a high degree of customization/extensibility in the future product is a key requirement. One way to help us understand future extensibility needs is to first understand how you customize today. This is a purposefully open-ended question:
Please provide us with examples of customizations or extensions you have made to Tessitura and the business case behind why you made the extension.
We aren’t looking for every customization, but one or two samples that are either most representative or most difficult to accomplish in current Tessitura.
A quartet of examples:
1. We created a custom Box Office Statement in InfoMaker to match specific output field requirements of our promoter. This allows us to settle with the promoter in an efficient and speedy fashion, without us having to run multiple reports and combine them after the fact.
2. We adapted lp_customer_rank to automatically assign a constituency code of ‘Student’ if the constituent has purchased tickets to our Education season and has a customer type of Child. This allows CSRs to quickly identify students when looking up an account, and makes list pulling easier.
3. We created a custom constituent screen using InfoMaker to hold detailed information about our Press contacts. This allows us to have information about all constituents in one place, and ensures we can track specific seating assignments and preferences based on the reviewer.
4. We created a set of pages on our website to record individual member names on a family membership, tied to a custom table and custom membership card output so we can print individual member names on membership cards and link them back to a single membership in Tessitura. This means that multiple members of a household can each have their own personalized membership card while retaining a single membership on the household itself.
Thanks!
Andrew
1. SalesWatch
Scenario
We needed a utility that delivered live sales figures from Tessitura for all productions to various stakeholders within the organisation whether they had a log in (or the inclination to log in) to Tessitura or not. The figures must incorporate sales made by external ticket agencies where relevant and the productions presented to each user must respect the security context within Tessitura. Existing sales reports placed too heavy a toll on the system especially when being run concurrently by a large number of users in the context of a busy onsale day. Our solution had to be fast, place little load on the database and be accessible enough for the senior executive to use without the need to log in to Tessitura.
Solution
‘SalesWatch’. As most target users were already regular users of our intranet site, we built an HTML based report delivery system that executed various custom stored procedures acting on the Tessitura database. These were built especially to deliver critical sales information fast (we anticipated that this would be expected in a browser environment). Users can either look at the sales of a particular production at a performance level (with ‘today’s’ sales highlighted), get a production level summary within a particular season or simply look at a whole day’s sales across all productions (ranked highest to lowest). The information refreshes almost instantly whatever ‘report’ users are looking at and however many users are using this utility. Agency sales are updated automatically once a day. We receive a consistently formatted spreadsheet (via email) from our two major ticket agencies each night. We have an Outlook macro which strips out the figures, places them in a CSV file and then a stored procedure runs later in Tessitura each night which places those figures into the database)
2. Administrating the School group transaction path
Our Education department needed help to administrate the typical transaction path for school groups purchasing show tickets. For schools, we accept unpaid reservations for particular events after which we send a confirmation, an invoice, a reminder to pay (for late payers), a receipt…etc. Each stage of the transaction path needed to be recorded somewhere and confirmations / invoices / reminders sent to schools with orders at particular stages.
We use a Tessitura order custom field to allow the Ed dept to set an order’s status to any one of a list of values they maintain in a local table. A snapshot of order statuses is taken every two hours so that we may maintain an historical record of the transaction path per constituent (and this is viewable by the Ed dept via a constituent based custom screen). We then set up a custom report which allows the Ed dept to select a batch of orders that fit the entered parameters for a given List of schools where the order status is, say, ‘Invoiced’. Another parameter allows them to select a suitable document format (e.g. ‘Reminder to Pay’) for that group of schools. And another parameter allows the Ed dept to mass change the order status for all orders that are picked up by the report as it prints to, say, ‘Reminder Sent’.
Regards
David