Second National Theatre Manager User Conference

Save the Date for a Proctors/Arts Management Collaboration
REGISTER NOW for early bird pricing

Mon, May 8 - Thurs, May 11, 2017
at Proctors Theatre
Schenectady, New York.

Updated April 6, 2016

For venues using authorize.net, the issues authorizing cards was caused by authorize.net making production server changes and eliminating an important bit of deader information in the credit card authorization response send back to Theatre Manager. As noted in the developer comments for the day, they removed an important bit of information - the 'content-length' header which contains the size of the message being returned. This is a very important part of all https requests - and was restored towards the end of the day.

April 5, 2016

If you use authorize.net and Theatre Manager 10.05.xx, you may be running into issues authorizing and/or settling your credit card batches. Authorize.net indicated they would throw the switch to require TLS 1.2 sometime after they sent a warning letter to merchants in September 2015. In that letter, Authorize.net said they would follow the PCI council mandate for TLS 1.2 before June 2016.

Well, April 4th, 2016 is as good a day as any. We've had a few venues (using TM 10.05.xx) tell us that Authorize.net does not like the settlement message we've been sending for years while others (using 10.06.xx) are working fine. The conclusion is that authorize.net threw the switch to require TLS 1.2

First National Theatre Manager User Conference

Save the Date for a Proctors/Arts Management Collaboration

Mon, May 9 - Wed, May 11, 2016
at Proctors Theatre
Schenectady, New York.

An Invitation to Learning

Proctors, in association with Arts Management Systems, invites you to the First National Theatre Manager Conference.

For the past 5 years, Proctors and other presenting houses using Theatre Manager in the North East have hosted annual regional conferences. Attendees coming to these friendly informative sessions have steadily grown and we are excited to extend this platform to a national level.

These conferences are aimed at employees and volunteers engaged in box office, marketing, patron development, database and server management, accounting, web sales, ticket scanning and other topics.

Specific details will follow in about a week.

Conference Organization

Arts Management Systems, beleives passionately that the best user conference experience is one that is owned and organized by the users themselves.

While our staff will host some topics, the user community will present some other really interesting sessions. If the past is any guide, expect a lot of interaction with your peers as well as revelations about the extensive capabilities of Theatre Manager.

There are some key things to know about this version:

• Theatre Manager has been audited for compliance with PCI-PA DSS 3.1 and the report is being submitted to the PCI council for approval. Theatre Manager has implemented PCI compliance requirements for nearly 15 years. Since 2008, the PCI council requires external auditing of our code and processes by a third party and we have recently finished the 4th successful biennial audit with Security Metrics in Utah. It is a big occasion for all of us.
• Security requirements change constantly in the face of threats. This version of Theatre Manager meets the most stringent requirements for authorizing credit cards using TLS 1.2 encryption. Banks require this by jun 2016, or earlier - all credit card authorizations must use this advanced encryption. It means you could have up to 6 months to install version 10.06. Plenty of time, but earlier is better.
• The responsive web pages have been very well received by everybody who has implemented them. This version contains some tweaks from feedback and become the standard pages deployed with the second gen listener and apache installers. The older style pages will still work if you prefer them.
• Online Subscription Renewals have a new feature to allow easy renewal of all subscriptions in a patrons package, including removal/including of optional events.
• Very easy implementation of google analytics of your web pages accesses, providing free completion statistics and page tracking. get a far better handle on your customer usage of your site. Just add the account to your Web Listener Setup - or let us help you do it.
• and more...

Refer to the full release notes and installation instructions for more information

• Google reiterated their announcement from much earlier this year that they would no longer support XP, Vista and OSX 10.08 and earlier as of the end of 2015
• The banking system, specifically the PCI council, has announced that only advanced security like TLS 1.2 and later will be supported for authorization of credit cards.
• The PCI council is also requiring use of TLS 1.2 or later for web sites that support e-commerce in order to protect the consumer from fraud.

Theatre Manager is keeping abreast of these changes, many times on a daily basis. We continually update all of our software components to work with the latest security requirements.

At this time there are no known compatibility issues. However, it you wish to install El Capitan at your venue, we advise doing it to only ONE machine to start with and use it for a few days to find out if you have compatibility problems with other applications used in conjunction with Theatre Manager. We cannot say for sure if all your other important applications work, so best approach is one machine at a time.

Please do not update the postgres, apache, or second generation listeners servers at this time. Those servers also work with El Capitan - but save those for a couple of weeks.

The responsive web pages are available free to all venues. If you would like to try them out on our test web site, click this link for www2.artsman.com

A number of venues are already using them.

Background

A way was found to show the name and address of a random patron who was not in your household via the account tab in web sales. No other data could ever be displayed (passwords and PCI information were never at risk). The worst possible outcome is that somebody, if they knew about the issue, could look up a name that they could find in the phonebook.

The issue was identified on Monday morning and a fix was auto-deployed by late afternoon the same day. Versions affected were TM 10.02, 10.03, 10.04, and 10.05 and a separate patch was issued for each version.