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Print at home ticket design 101

James Herberson
$organization

Hey all,

I haven't searched extensively on this so forgive me if this topic has been covered, but I'm wondering if there's a FAQ or a thread already where people are sharing their dos/don'ts or gotchas with the PAH setup.

If not, I'd like to see some of your ticket designs and hear about some of your experiences.  I've got the service running in our test environment and it's time to put together a sensible ticket design.

Thanks for all your help,
Jim

  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization
    There is an NScan group on the Tessitura Network website, but I don't see a forum, and there are no posts in the NScan group.  Perhaps discussion could occur there.
     
    We've had great success with PAH...we haven't formally announced the PAH option to our patrons, but they discovered it on our website only two hours after going live and we received two orders that first night, and have received a total of 37 orders ( 107 tickets) in less than a month (with NO advertising).
     
    We've also had no trouble with patrons bringing their PAH tickets to the performances and no trouble with scanning the PAH tickets.
     

    acerpPenny Tabor
    IT Manager
    Midland Center for the Arts
    Midland, MI 48640


    From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of James Herberson
    Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 1:37 PM
    To: Tabor, Penny
    Subject: [Tessitura Technical Forum] Print at home ticket design 101

    Hey all,

    I haven't searched extensively on this so forgive me if this topic has been covered, but I'm wondering if there's a FAQ or a thread already where people are sharing their dos/don'ts or gotchas with the PAH setup.

    If not, I'd like to see some of your ticket designs and hear about some of your experiences.  I've got the service running in our test environment and it's time to put together a sensible ticket design.

    Thanks for all your help,
    Jim




    This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Technical Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Technical forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!
  • Former Member
    Former Member $organization
    One recommendation I forgot to mention, is that I strongly encourage you to have copies of all ticket orders (configured in the "E-ticketServerServiceLive" config file) sent to another mailbox/email address where they can be stored and accessed in case patrons encounter trouble.  Someone at a conference session in San Antonio made that recommendation, and I am glad that I wrote it down.  It has been very useful to us already.  Out of 41 orders, we have probably had 5 customers call back and report that they did not get the file or had trouble printing it.  I have copies of our orders going to my help desk address/mailbox in Outlook.  I then set a rule to redirect all those messages with the PAH subject line into another mail subfolder that I call "Live PAH orders."  I then also created a public folder in Outlook, called "PAH Orders", which all box office staff can access ("Reviewer" permissions on the folder), and I copy the orders from my "Live PAH orders" subfolder into the "PAH Orders" public folder.  Thus, we have two backups of all PAH orders.  As the performances occur, I can then archive old PAH orders so that the mail folders do not grow too large.
     
    Another thing to mention is to be aware of the size of the pdf ticket file that gets created.  Originally we had a very large graphic on our pdf template design, which then caused the pdf ticket file to be more than 1MB in size (for each ticket).  Since some ISPs place a limit on the incoming email size, we were concerned that the large file might not be delivered to customers' email folders.  We were able to reduce the graphic to a much smaller size, and now each ticket file size is about 400KB.  We had one person order 10 tickets and I believe the file size ended up being 4MB.
     
    Hope this helps.
     

    acerpPenny Tabor
    IT Manager
    Midland Center for the Arts
    Midland, MI 48640


    From: Tessitura Technical Forum [mailto:forums-technical@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of James Herberson
    Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 1:37 PM
    To: Tabor, Penny
    Subject: [Tessitura Technical Forum] Print at home ticket design 101

    Hey all,

    I haven't searched extensively on this so forgive me if this topic has been covered, but I'm wondering if there's a FAQ or a thread already where people are sharing their dos/don'ts or gotchas with the PAH setup.

    If not, I'd like to see some of your ticket designs and hear about some of your experiences.  I've got the service running in our test environment and it's time to put together a sensible ticket design.

    Thanks for all your help,
    Jim




    This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Technical Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Technical forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!
  • $organization in reply to Former Member

    Thanks, Penny.  I have set up a bcc to our ticketoffice to be able to help those customers who have problems already as I'd heard that at conference as well.

    Would you be willing to share your ticket design?  I'd like to see more examples and see what most people are doing...overall layout, disclaimer language, etc...

    Thanks for the advice!

    /Jim

  • $organization

    Sort of on the same topic...as anyone out there using PAH that is not currently using access control devices?  Would love to be able to do PAH, but we cannot purchase scanners at this time.  Just wondering if others are in the same boat but went ahead anyway!

    Thanks!

    Brandon

  • $organization in reply to Brandon Walls

    I'd like to know the same as Brandon if anyone out there can help!

    Thanks

    Siobhan

  • $organization in reply to James Herberson

    Here is an example of our Print at Home ticket design.

     

  • $organization in reply to Christian Mauri

    Thanks for posting the sample...we too are just in the design phase. I would love to see what everyone out there is doing for their PAHT. It seems there are a LOT of different concepts out ther as to what the tickets should look like.

     

  • $organization in reply to Jen Skelly

    We've had PAHT running in our Test environment for a while, but have only recently finalized our template.  We had a recommendation to keep the PDF size under 100k, and we've managed to get it just under 90k, although we have no large images.  We had a bit of a problem with that at one point, but you can see significant changes in file size depending on how you import images into Acrobat.  I don't do design work, so I'm afraid I don't know the details.

    One other design recommendation was to place the bar codes in such a way that they would not be in the crease should the customer fold the page in a typical way (i.e. quarters or thirds).

    We also intend to run a soft launch shortly.  I'll see about posting an example then.

  • $organization in reply to Brandon Walls

    Brandon,

    Wondering if you got any feed back on this question?

    We are in the process of launching Print @ home and only have enough budget to purchase access control for some of our larger venues.  It has been recommended not launch print at home for any venue unless you have access control in place (to eliminate multiple entries on one PDF, limits to the full functionality of knowing who is in your house).

    We have also discovered with our web vendor that the print @ home functional via the internet is on a per order basis, so if a venue with access control and a venue without access control are placed in the same shopping basket, then print @ home capabilities are not available.  Wondering if anyone is mixing access control venues with non- access control venues in the same order/shopping cart.

    Any feedback would be appreciated!

    Thanks- Lisa