We are really excited to announce that over the weekend of the 24th/25th July, we will be launching EventHQ version 4.0. This is a major upgrade with some major new features being added, plus some enhancements to existing features and changes to the workflows to make EventHQ easier to work with.

Here is a brief teaser for the major changes being made. This is not an exhaustive list by any means!

1. Audit trails and event logging
   Allows users to see at a glance changes made across the whole account, within an event and even within an individual booking over time. This is an exceptionally powerful and useful new feature and will be reviewed in more detail in a forthcoming blog post;
2. Name badges
   Create templates for name badges containing multiple lines of information pulled from the attendee record. Templates can be styled to your needs including a background image. To create badges, simply select the template to use and go! Your badges will be created and downloaded as a PDF file ready for printing on suitable Avery (or similar) paper.
3. Public page look and feel
   In addition to the custom template service we offer, EHQ v4 allows you some control over the look and feel of your public pages including background colours and font colours.
4. Enhanced search
   Search, filter and export attendee and contact data using any field within your registration form. E.g. if you have collected ‘region’ data, you can search by region and you can even perform negative searches (e.g. find all attendees not in region x). See a screenshot of this feature here.
5. Registration workflow
   The registration workflow for EventHQ 3 has caused some attendees some difficulty, particularly when performing group bookings. The booking workflow both when creating new bookings and when editing existing bookings has been completely restructured to be considerably easier to understand and use.
6. Email handling
   A new email sending process has been put in place for EHQ v4 to improve deliverability of automated emails and to notify administrators of any bounced emails. In the event that an email does not get sent to the recipient, their record will now be flagged for investigation by an administrator.
7. Administrator UI
   The administrator user interface has been rebuilt from the ground up to be clearer and more structured than in EHQ v3.

As per our earlier blog post, EHQ v4 will no longer officially support Internet Explorer 6. If you are still using IE6 we strongly recommend you upgrade to IE8 or change to a (in our opinion better) web browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

EventHQ will go offline at 10:00am BST on Saturday 24th July and, unless there are unforeseeable issues, will be live again by 18:00 BST on Sunday 25th July.

If you have any questions about the upgrade process or what any of the changes might mean for your events then as ever, get in touch with us.

EventHQ version 3 allows administrators to search within lists of attendees and contacts by name, email address and other key information. However users wanted to be able to search by other information collected within the registration form as well.

We are delighted to announce that the forthcoming EventHQ version 4 will support searching by any piece of information collected for an attendee. Users will be able to search not just for records containing a piece of information but also for records which do not contain a piece of information.

At the next major EventHQ update we will be phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). All users are encouraged to upgrade to a more modern web browser.

• Internet Explorer 8
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Safari

IE6 was launched in 2001, some 9 years ago. Subsequently Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) have been released (2006 and 2009 respectively) and Internet Explorer 9 is in the works. Our decision to drop support for IE6 has been driven by analytics which show that IE6 usage is now confined to a minority of our customers. Since modern web browsers provide a substantially better online experience, we feel now is the right time to drop IE6.

Why is IE6 usage dropping?

We believe there are two main drivers for IE6 usage dropping.

1. Upgrades; IE6 is 9 years old and 2 replacements have been released in that time. It is only natural that most users will have upgraded or purchased new computers with a newer version of IE pre-installed in that time.
2. Security; THe recently publicised hacking attacks on Google, Adobe and other high-profile companies was enabled, in part, by security flaws in IE6. As a result, both commercial and non-commercial organisations are actively upgrading their internal machines to avoid being subjected to the same sorts of attack.

What will this mean in practice for EventHQ users?

The improvements and some features of new version of EventHQ may not work with IE 6. If you are using IE 7, Firefox 2 or 3, or Safari, you need not do anything. However, if you are using IE 6, and you want to make sure everything works, you will need to upgrade to a more modern browser. The links at the top of this post will help you with this.

The majority of cutting-edge features are to be found in the administration interface of EventHQ and we realise that whilst you can upgrade your own browser, you cannot control your customers browsers. Therefore, whilst we will not be officially supporting IE6, the public pages of EventHQ where your customers actually register, will be developed to be as compatible with IE6 as possible whilst still offering a great experience for users of up-to-date web browsers.

A number of customers have told us that when they export their bookings data to an excel file, some fields are replaced with the word ‘array’.

This fault has now been solved and we also took the opportunity to improve the ease with which you can export registration data for your events to Excel. Why not take the free online demo for a test drive yourself to see how easy EventHQ is to use?

Happy New Year to all our customers for 2010. We have (finally!) managed to find time over the Christmas break to get a blog up and running. We will be publishing posts both on EventHQ itself (e.g. new features on the way or tips on getting the most from the system) and also on the many and wonderful events that you are running through EventHQ. If you have an event you would like us to talk about then please fire off an email to us!

In the meantime, a major update of EventHQ is taking shape with an approximate launch date in April/May 2010. During 2009 we listened carefully to both existing and prospective customers to find out how we could make organising events easier for you. Look out for a series of articles describing the improvements being made to EventHQ for 2010.