renewal form

Hi David,

The canned renewal form in Tessitura is very, very basic and looks like an invoice. I've attached a screen shot of the generic form so you can get a feel for it. You can generate this in your own system (Test is best so you don't update anything in Live). Just be sure to assign the renewal form type in TR_SEASON.

I believe most organizations create custom renewal forms in InfoMaker rather than using this out of the box form. If you have a report writer on staff you could do this in house. We used Tess Consulting services to create our custom report.

Very helpful. Thank you Beth.

Could a custom form be created using Adobe Acrobat Pro and form fields (a la Print At Home ticketing templates)?

I think for it to work right within Tess it has to be an InfoMaker thing. But I could definitely be wrong about that.

Unknown said:

I think for it to work right within Tess it has to be an InfoMaker thing. But I could definitely be wrong about that.

We use a custom subscription renewal forum created in SSRS. Works great.

IIRC, I think the only thing we carried over from the standard renewal report code was an update of date_last_ren_notice_generd in the table t_cust_subscription_summary.

By what avenue does one acquire InfoMaker? We've attempted to download a trial from a particular website and it has been a big runaround.

We also use SSRS to create our renewal forms.    They can be printed individually on-demand or bulk printed all at once at the beginning of the renewal process.  We have a blank template form printed and then use SSRS to fill -in and overprint the data fields.  I've included samples below of how the data looks with and without the template form.

Thank you! A quick search turned up many more tutorials about SSRS than InfoMaker, so that may be the way to go. To get started do I need the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Report Builder or... SQL Server 2012 Express? (Or perhaps something similarly named at the Microsoft download site?)

David -

For either form of reporting - if you are going to make any of the reporting/invoicing available through Tessitura - you want to be really careful to use the versions of the software that Tessitura is using. 

For InfoMaker you have to purchase it, and there's information here:http://www.tessituranetwork.com/en/network/Products/New%20Technology%20Initiative/~/media/Files/Products/Next%20Gen/InfoMaker_v12_Pricing.ashx

Make sure you get 12.1 (which is 12.0 with a patch) and not 12.5 which is the latest release. There's a good forum thread with links to the patch here: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/Community/forums/t/5841.aspx

For SSRS reports you need to be using some form of Visual Studio 2008. There are some great T-Casts about making reports using SSRS:
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/network/Learning/Webinars%20Archive/IT.aspx

HTH,

Heather

I have downloaded the Tessitura Sample Library and attempted to open the sample renewal forms PBL. My computer wanted to open it with Photoshop, but could not. Do we need to have InfoMaker to open and rearrange the layout of the sample renewal forms? Thank you.

Hi David

Yes, you need InfoMaker to open pbl files. They are Infomaker report libraries. 

[Well, technically, you could also open them with the full version of Powerbuilder, which Infomaker is a part of, I suppose]

You really still need to have Infomaker if you're going to do any report development by modifying existing Tess reports, which is often the easiest way to get to custom reporting.

If you're starting new reports from scratch, I'd be using SSRS, though.

Ken