More new stuff hits ResEngine today:

Dormitory Reservation Support

We call it dorm reservations, but it’s probably more properly referred
to as the ability to book multiple reservations into a single
resource. When setting up or editing a resource, just click “Allow
Multiple Reservations” if you’d like to allow multiple overlapping
bookings. ResEngine will then manage to your total occupancy,
regardless of who’s in there already. This is a great feature for
customers with overflow “dormitory” space that is reserved by bed
instead of by room.

Better Support for Internet Explorer

Some testers mocked us, but we wanted to make ResEngine available to
our friends who still use Internet Explorer. Thanks to Huey for his
hard work on this, especially when I went in and undid his changes so
he’d have to do them again. So IE7 and IE8 are supported feature for
feature, apart from a few animations, rounded corners and a few other
bits of polish.

A new ResEngine screencast has been posted. It’s about six minutes long and it’s a great overview of the application. You can view it at the ResEngine site here. I’ve also embedded it here. Once you click play, you will probably want to expand it to fullscreen to see the text better (the fullscreen toggle is near the bottom right of the player, it looks like a rectangular video screen).

Major User Interface Upgrade

Kudos to Hannah and Liz for some major user interface design work.
They created lots of accounts selling everything from Palapas to Jet
Skis (I SELL BOATS!) and came up with a ton of changes, upgrades and
polish that really help make ResEngine faster and easier to use. And
gosh it’s getting right pretty too!

Multiple Calendars

Admins can now set up multiple calendars from the settings menu and
all users can move resources on to and off of each calendar. This
makes the “main page” in ResEngine 3 times better (if you set up three
calendars!) because you can flip back and forth quickly to view
different groups of resources. What will people do with multiple
calendars? Perhaps show “King Beds” and “Twin Beds”, or show “Ocean
Views” and “Pool Views”, or use it to separate different parts of
their business with “Hotel Rooms”, “Villas”, “Dorms” and “Vans”.

Support for Today

Note to self: always include a “Today” button in the Time Machine. I
was so busy trying to fool the calendar by typing “2nd Friday in
August” that I forgot that most of the time when the phone rings you
want to zip back to today. So ta-da… a handy “Today Button”. Don’t
worry, if you need to zip to the 2nd Friday in August, that still
works to.

Streamlined Sign Up Without a Credit Card

We’ve updated the sign up process to allow for fast and easy account
creation, so we can encourage everyone to sign up and check things
out, even if they’re not the “dude with the card.” Create an account,
set things up and then show your boss how he can’t live without it!

Account Reset / Forgot Password

Overlooked for too long, ResEngine will now e-mail you a link to reset
your password if you forget it. So everyone pick better passwords, no
need to remember them now!

Tweaks, Fixes, Spit & Polish

Too many little things to mention this time, including some fine
tuning on the event calendar, enhancements to the pop-up edit windows,
and some plain ol’ cleaning up!