Hi everyone,
I can't do what I need to be doing at the moment, so I thought I'd open a thread on disaster recovery/coping scenarios should anyone need it! Our procedures seem to be holding up so far today, and we have ONE user who has managed to stay logged in since this morning and was able to batch print tonight's tickets. How are you all doing?
Hi from Maine, we've been down all day. In the spirit of discussing disaster strategy:
My box office is really down and out today, telling people that systems are down and we will complete their ticket requests tomorrow and not able to do much more. We do have a contingency plan for our opening day (tomorrow, no pressure). If we are unable to scan tickets to a theatre performance, we will ask guests to have their order receipt ready at the door rather than their tickets. We will equip ushers at the door with a spreadsheet on a laptop. They would verify that the guest's receipt has a transaction for this day's show, then write down the guest's name and seat assignments on the spreadsheet. If a guest is at the door without a receipt, we would accept the comp "ticket" as it's our system's issue and take their name and let them in, then perhaps make a note on their record explaining the event later. This way we at least have a real-time attendance record that can be retroactively entered by our box office later on.
It's entirely prehistoric, but without Tess we really have no data about the current day's attendance, nor do we have a way to verify or scan them in.
If you have nscan/access control, you might be able to scan in offline mode! and then you can upload the data once you have a stable connection again. And if you can get onto your website, you might be able to at least see what seats are still open/not, in case you have people who come that you need to seat somewhere.
Offline is an excellent idea, thank you for that. We are fully down - application and website - but we do still have seats available for the performance should that scenario present itself. Thanks Kathleen.
Hi from Connecticut! Our Front Desk has been non-operational all day. We've lost a little bit of revenue (around $100). Thankfully it happened on one of our really slow days. Interestingly enough our NSCAN is ok, so if anyone bought tickets before it went down we can scan them.
Some of our back office staff (Education, Development, Finance, etc.) have been able to sluggishly get work done, but only a select few. This is the first time this has happened to us, so we don't exactly have a procedure of how to run without it. So basically our entire staff took today as a do nothing day, or do other projects that aren't Tessitura related.
I know contingency planning is a bit different for museums, but we have a few things we do as a theatre - we schedule seating books (report of customers and their seats) periodically throughout the day and they're emailed to a gmail account, along with house map prints, so that we know what seats are open/available/held, as of the last time the reports were sent. We also have a Square account that we can use to take charges, and are able to do offline scanning. Not perfect, and there's always cleanup later, but... we're not totally crippled.
Our museum admission is free, so we can just keep a count of how many walk-ins we have and then enter them later. (Although we are operational in New Orleans).
We have been most of the day here in St. Pete, FL. The Ticket Center manager hasn't been able to pull any batches, including for the morning concert tomorrow.
I just checked the Service Status on the Self-Help Dashboard. It said functionality has returned to TNEW sites, but they continue to monitor the situation closely while they work on restoring access to the Tessitura client application.
We're in the Central time zone, so unaffected. However, our downtime contingency is to process sales on Square. Our theaters are GA, so we can continue to sell into those as well.
Once everything is back up, we import all the sales (tickets and memberships) into Tessitura. Since NScan works offline, we continue scanning. We are working with Extended Services to create a utility to mark our Square tickets as attended, so our attendance records are correct.
Kathleen's idea of having the seating books emailed each day (or multiple times per day) is a good one. Sometimes access to the application doesn't mean that you won't get your reports delivered.
Curious to know if anyone that is down is still receiving scheduled reports that are configured to be emailed.
Hope things come back soon for y'all.