A new report is now available for all Arctic Reservation customers. The reservation summary report allows you to prepare a table showing all launches over a certain period of time. For each launch, there are lists of the individual reservations with details on the primary guest, the number of guests and deposit information. This summary is easy to print (just clicking print in the browser should give you a high quality, nice looking printout). Whether printed or viewed on the computer, the list gives a nice overview of coming season and can offer a great quick reference to upcoming availability.

You can provide a variety of different search parameters when preparing the reservation summary, such as what trip types to include and what date range to include. In addition, the reservation summary can be customized for some outfitters to include pool dates in case a particular launch is overbooked and more permits need to be purchased.

And of course, the reservation summary has full support for sublaunches. Sublaunches and their reservations will be enumerated separately on the summary.

Want to try preparing a reservation summary? Current customers can access it through the “Reports” menu. If you are not yet a customer, sign up for a demo to try out the handy reservation summary.

I am happy to announce that Arctic Reservations is once again offering SSL encrypted access. This feature was offered a short while ago, but due to complications that prevented some users from accessing the software, we rolled back the SSL option until the larger problems could be fixed. After many tweaks and hours calling others for input, SSL is now available again!

All users can access their primary Arctic Reservations installation via a 256bit SSL certificate. This means that all data sent between your computer and our server is encrypted using todays leading encryption technique. Although the risk of such communications being intercepted is extremely low, it is becoming increasingly important to protect client data.

The need for security is especially important for an upcoming feature that I can only hint at now: “credit card processing.” When handling client credit card information, it is vital to implement such leading encryption tools to prevent fraud and ensure the security of your customer’s personal information. More details about credit card processing will be coming soon, as our first beta testing will begin shortly.

Note that SSL certificate installation required some big changes: we had to rewrite a core set of files and completely reconfigure the server (this is why it took so long to offer this feature). During the upgrade, all installations had to be moved to a new IP address. Although this should not adversely effect software performance, your computer may still try to access the old IP address for 24-48 hours. As a result, you will not be able to access your installation. If this happens to you, please call your support representative and he/she will provide instructions for clearing cached DNS information. During such a large overhaul, other problems may have arisen. If this is the case, please contact support right away… we will be standing by to make any needed corrections.

By default, all accounts allow users to select whether or not to use SSL certificates when they first access the website. Administrators can change settings to either always require an SSL access or never allow SSL access. I strongly encourage administrators to always require SSL certificates.