[webco-announce] Major New WebCheckout Portal Release Announcement

[Daniel Pyne]

Dear WebCheckout Community and Friends,

We are very pleased to announce the release of WebCheckout 3.3.1. Those 
of you who have been following the WebCheckout version numbers will 
notice that WebCheckout has grown out of the 3.2.x generation as this 
release constitutes a significant advancement in WebCheckout’s Patron 
Initiated Reservations (PIR) customer portal module.

Thanks to the feedback provided by many of you, the WebCheckout 
development team, lead by Craig Ludington, has successfully completed a 
complete rewrite of PIR to provide you with a vastly improved product. 
Following is a list of major improvements to the PIR customer portal:

PIR and WebCheckout now support image display of resource types.  This 
moves PIR into a more educational role as students and faculty can view 
their scheduled resources and read salient operating information prior 
to using the equipment.

For customers with the Reservation by Resource Type Module, PIR can now 
schedule resources by resource type as well as by resource.  This solves 
the problem of having to edit PIR reservations in WebCheckout when the 
resource reserved is not available, cannot be found, or when it is 
simply not necessary to look for a specific resource of a generic 
resource category.

Customers who are not authorized to use certain resource types will no 
longer see these equipment categories in PIR.  This improves the user 
experience and reduces the time spent explaining to people why they are 
not allowed to use unauthorized resources.

A “minimum reservation lead time” policy has been added to the 
WebCheckout circulation settings to allow managers to prevent customers 
from making last minute reservations in PIR, if they so choose.

PIR now ships with a template based interface which can be customized to 
your liking using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and simple HTML 
templates.  This allows you complete flexibility designing an interface 
and workflow to emulates the look and feel of your department web site 
without needing to have a PhD in Computer Science.

Using the “Woofie” technology driving the new PIR, multiple instances of 
PIR can be installed to handle multiple concurrent scheduling requests 
without slowing WebCheckout operations.

Thanks in large part to the front end design and development prowess of 
our Eli Naeher, the new PIR interface uses “Ajax”, shorthand for 
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, to increase WebCheckout responsiveness 
and provide user feedback without having to refresh the browser.

For example, when a PIR customer conducts a search for a projector, PIR 
will respond immediately with resources containing 'pr', then 'pro', 
'proj' and so on.  When setting dates for your reservation, you can now 
simply type 'next Wednesday' or 'one week from today' as the start or 
end time for your reservation. We've also provided a handy and readily 
accessible user guide to further assist new users as they make their 
nascent PIR reservations.

In short, words can only go so far in conveying the differences between 
the old and new PIR.  We welcome you to take a look yourselves. Please 
feel free to contact us for a demonstration of this significant new release.

Yours truly,

The WebCheckout Team
-- 
Daniel T. Pyne
Vice-President, Sales
WebCheckout, Inc.
3717 N. Ravenswood Ave., Suite 140
Chicago, IL 60613-3880
Tel: 773-477-7019 ext. 117
Fax: 773-477-7021
www.webcheckout.net