Táve (tave.com) has released a major update to their photography studio management web application with over 50 new features and improvements. Táve - originally named Táve Studio Manager - gives studio photographers’ clients the freedom to book them online. The update streamlines many common tasks and adds extensive new customisation capabilities throughout the application, contact forms, and client access booking engine. Some of the enhancements and additions include new client and job profiles and editors, a filter control to the Clients home page, a number of custom fields, Client Access Preview, job printouts and calendar improvements. Táve offers a free 30-day trial, after which the service costs $24.95 per month + $5 for each additional employee.

Táve Update Announcement

Major new software update

We’re proud to announce our largest software update ever today! With over 50 new features and improvements, this update streamlines many common tasks and adds extensive new customization capabilities throughout the application, contact forms, and client access booking engine.

New Client And Job profiles and editors. We completely reworked the way you view and edit clients and jobs.  Instead of going right into big bulky editors, you view a concise profile with just the relevant facts.  This also let us add useful links, for instance you can click on an address to view it in Google Maps, or click on the directions link to get directions from your studio’s address (configurable in Settings), telephone numbers will open Skype or any other voice chat software you have installed and set to use the links, and you can just click the “export vCard” link in the title bar to quickly add the contact to Address Book or Outlook and later sync to your phone if desired.

You might notice we also added a filter control to the Clients home page.  The new Job editor also includes some miniature subject editors and a new control for attaching vendors and venues without leaving the page, even creating new ones!  You’ll be seeing more of this cool new control in the future.  If you’ve attached a vendor or venue to a job, they’ll show up in the event editor’s list of possible attendees.  Speaking of vendors, you can now upload attachments to vendors.

Custom Fields. You’ve long asked to be able to create your own fields for the various profiles, and now you can.  This is extremely flexible and you can add all sorts of fields to the client, subject, job, vendor, and vendor rep profiles.  Even better, you can include these fields on your contact forms, which now also supports drag-and-drop reordering, and include the client editable fields inside Client Access, as we’ve added client profile editing in Client Access.  If your client access settings previously had the option enabled to allow clients to edit their contact information (an option that was marked as coming soon previously), the new profile editor will show up automatically.  Speaking of Client Access…

Client Access Preview. Users frequently wanted to see what their clients were seeing on their client access pages, doing so required setting a password for them and remembering to reset everything afterwards.  That was particularly ineffective if you wanted to see something like the payment page.  No more!  Head on over to the client profile page and you’ll see that the orange Client Access box now has a preview link.  Click the link and you’ll get a new window with their session.  The bar at the top includes a menu of the key pages inside their Client Access portal, so you can use it to jump directly from page to page without affecting the client at all.

Job Printouts. The new job profile viewer includes a Print button.  Click it and you can fine-tune the information you want included depending on if you’re printing it for your physical record keeping or to keep with you on the day of the job.  This printout is meant to contain all the critical aspects of the job, including attendee contact info, event locations, call notes, internal notes, financial transactions, and custom fields.  That’s just the start, as we plan to offer other types of printouts in the future, as requested in Idea Bank.

Calendar improvements include an improved Heads Up Display system which allow the HUDs to stay open when your mouse is over them, so you can now click on events or jobs and even create new events or unavailable time directly from the HUDs. You’ll notice that you can also click on a day in the availability calendar to go directly to creating a new event. We also add tentative events to the availability calendar, which you can hide or show by clicking the link in above the calendar.

Helpful but smaller improvements include your browser’s history now showing the page title, instead of the application name for every page so you can easily go back without having to guess which page was where. We’ve added a passive anti-spam system to the contact forms to help limit lead spam, if you host your own contact form please see the release notes.

Release Notes

We updated much more than the major changes above, so here’s the full list:

  * New name and website addresses.
  * New public website.  Note that the login link is the right-most item in the navigation and takes you to a dedicated login page now.  We’re going to be adding testimonials to the homepage soon, so if you’d like to rave about Táve, send us a testimonial, logo, and photo.
  * Changed the appearance of the main search field to make it more apparent and improving compatibility with Safari.
  * Added additional details about the items needing attention on the home page.
  * Added tentative events to the availability calendar with a hide/show toggle in the legend.
  * Made days in the availability calendar clickable to create new events.
  * Added links to the events and jobs as well as to quickly create a new event or unavailable time to the availability calendar HUDs.
  * Added a filter menu to the Clients home.
  * Added an icon to show the user has CA (Client Access) enabled.
  * Added a client profile viewer.
  * Added a vCard export link.
  * Added a “Mark as lost” button to match the existing one for jobs, but applying to the client, cascading to all jobs.
  * Previewing the amount a client can pay in CA and explaining why it may not be the full balance.
  * Linking addresses to Google Maps and adding a directions link too.
  * Linking telephone numbers to phone applications like Skype with the tel:// scheme.
  * Added link to the previous and next events for the client.
  * Showing the first and most recent job source for a client.
  * Showing the last time the client accessed their CA profile, if ever, and how many pages they loaded.
  * Added a “Allow profile editing?” per-client override.
  * Added a preview link which opens a new window with the CA preview for the client.
  * CA preview let’s you jump between pages inside the client’s portal.
  * Notes are created inline more intuitively.
  * Cleaned up the client editor.
  * Allowing client profile editing in Client Access if enabled in the page’s settings.
  * Added job profile viewer.
  * All changes on both profile viewers happen live.
  * Emails and phone numbers in the client/subject HUDs are now clickable.
  * Added a Print button, which allows you to configure a new all-in-one job printout, optionally showing financial details, internal notes, conversation logs, and call/event descriptions.
  * Created a new “Token editor”, which lets you search, add, and create new items live.
  * Created a new “live editor”, used by the token editor to quickly edit items without leaving the current page.  Expect much more use of this in the future.
  * Using the token editor to create and/or attach vendors and venues to the job.
  * Added quick entry forms for subjects so you no longer have to leave the editor to add subjects.
  * Including any vendors attached to the job as possible attendees in the event editor.
  * Updated the Product Option editor to behave similar to other editors in the application.
  * Corrected currency symbol use in the Products section.
  * Improved the logic used to hide/show tasks based on the status of the deliverable or job.
  * Added attachments to the vendor editor.
  * Added vCard export links to vendors and vendor reps.
  * Fixed issue with the Helpdesk link reloading the application if your last login was a while ago.
  * Added an address book vCard export to Settings (not all third-party applications support multi-contact vCards).  Use this link to export all your contacts to Address Book on Mac and sync to your phone to have your client’s info appear when they call you.
  * Added a credit card authorization form in case you’d rather not use PayPal to pay for Táve.
  * Added Custom Profile Fields, which can be configured as various different types of fields (date, dropdown, text field, text box), apply to different items inside Táve (clients, subjects, jobs, vendors, vendor reps), and customize the appearance and permissions for Client Access.
  * Added drag and drop reordering to the Custom Profile Fields list so you can change tho order they appear throughout the application.
  * Added the new Custom Profile Fields to the contact form editor when they apply to clients, defaulting them to hidden.
  * Added drag and drop reordering of all contact form fields.
  * Removing Táve branding and links from the new lead email and adding a reply-to so you can more easily reply directly to new leads.
  * Added a passive anti-spam system to contact forms (if you host your contact form on your own site and post to us, let us know so we can disable this for your studio, as your users will receive a session error and will be told to try again).
  * Added a few dynamic fields to contracts in case you wish to have items like the client’s name or job date in your contract text.
  * Improved the birthday field behavior and international date handling.
  * Preventing double form submit.
  * Improved the display of errors in a form on submit.
  * Increased overall database performance.
  * Added support for Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 8 native-mode support (if you use IE7, we strongly encourage you to apply the IE8 windows update).

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