Morning all,
We moved to Hosted late last year and we want to review our contingency procedures. Whilst we can’t be 100% prepared for every eventually, we want to have some processes in place if we lost access to Tessitura and/or a stable internet connection to our site.
Previously we had some scheduled back up reports via a stored procedure that saved to our onsite network which we could refer to. Not that we are hosted this is trickier.
Can any other hosted organisations share the rough outlines of any contingency procedures they have? Main scenarios we are looking at are Hosted Services being completely down, interruption of internet to our site or internal network issues meaning some users can’t access Tessitura. With our previous contingency procedures, the main goal was to be able to get a show into our Main House space, even if we don’t have Tess at our Box Office counters.
Any help or even just some rough ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks, Donald
I've always gone with these:
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/en/Items/Videos/Training/Business-Continuity-Planning
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System/Content/Business%20Continuity%20Planning/Business%20Continuity%20Preparation.htm
I've found hosted easier. At one time the PAC box office was down (self hosted) I jumped in my car with my laptop running off my phone hotspot, and my portable lemur printer and put the show in that way.
Just had this conversation with my Director of Ticketing, actually! We have reports scheduled (house map print, seating book, certain sales reports) mailed to a box office gmail account on a set basis throughout the day. Depending on the situation, we would be prepared to go with laptops and portable hotspots (either cell phones or mifi devices), writing seating passes rather than trying to connect bocas to not-their-usual-computers, and/or using an alternate card payment system like Stripe should we need to.
In addition, while of course this forum will likely focus on the Tessitura specific aspects of disaster planning, one of the things we recently did was make sure we had two completely separate internet providers that came onto our campus through completely separate lines. This has already prevented a number of issues with internet outages due to what seems like constant construction by the city nearby to our campus.
Regarding the Tessitura stuff, I think the links Heath shared would cover most of my thoughts there.
I'm not sure if you're an Access Control/NSCAN user or not, but that's one more area to note: being ready to flip scanners into Offline Mode and continue scanning tickets during a network outage can pay dividends, since you can still piece together a reasonably accurate portrait of attendance after the fact. It doesn't serve to block tickets in the moment that might arrive for the incorrect venue, date, etc. but it at least creates a record of who showed up!
www.tessituranetwork.com/.../Tessitura.htm
Thanks all - very helpful as always!
In the wake of the Wordfly outage we were galvanized to get more serious about contingency planning. We're currently at that 80/20 point where we have done 80% of the work, and now only need to finish the remaining 20% using the remaining 80% of the effort.
What we've done to date is attempt an exhaustive catalog of service interruption scenarios (matched with various possible durations) followed by an attempt at an exhaustive catalog of mitigation options (emailed reports, rescheduling events, working from home, etc.) The remaining work is to connect the list of mitigation options to the scenario/duration listings. That part I've left to other parties, as those plans are going to depend heavily what department or organization (we are a consortium) is responding.
Hi Gawain,
Thanks for the reply. Would you be able to share the first part of your work (exhaustive catalog of service interruption scenarios (matched with various possible durations)? It would be great to see if it matches up with the list I have in my head of possible things to prepare for.Email is donaldgraham@birminghamhippodrome.com
Sorry for the delay, sent now.