Use our FAQs (frequently asked questions) below to quickly find the answers to many of your sales and support questions before you try to contact us.

The following technical related questions are often asked about our Book-It membership management and event booking software On-Line Module. Click on a question to access the answer or see our FAQ menu for other FAQs.

Why Do I Receive A Welcome Message When Logging In And Then Get Returned To The Login Screen?

This message gets reported to us occasionally. When a user logs in using an ID and password, their ID and password appear to be accepted, however, when they press the 'continue' button on the screen once they receive a welcome message and confirmation that they are logged in they are then returned back to the login screen again and asked for their user ID and password again as if their previous login was unsuccessful. They are then unable to proceed any further without keep coming back to this same screen asking for their login details over and over again.

We think that this problem is caused by a corrupt cookie. At some point the user has logged in and used the 'remember me' option to save their login details as a cookie on their PC in order to avoid having to log in each time they visit the site. At some point they may have changed their password and either the details of the new password were not updated in the cookie or the cookie has become corrupt. When the user logs in manually they are correctly being logged in, however, as they then move from screen to screen within the system, details are being retrieved from the cookie and found not to match the login details and so the user is instantly logged out again.

A likely solution to this problem is to delete the cookie that has been saved for the site being visited on your PC. To do this in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 you should select 'tools', 'internet options' from your browser Window, then press 'settings' and 'view files'. Choose 'view' then 'details' from the menu to get 4 columns of information about the files found and then click on the 'name' column to list files in name order. Now look down the list for files beginning 'cookie' and you should find one with a name such as 'cookie:yourname@www.sitename' where yourname is the name you login to your computer as (for example, John, Administrator, Guest User etc) and sitename is the name of the internet site that you are using. Once you have located the file click once on it to select it and then press your delete key.

Note that you can use the 'delete cookies' button in your browser rather than the above, however, that will delete all cookies rather than just the one that you are having difficulty with.

If this does not resolve the problem. Locate another PC and see if you can login correctly from there. If you can, check all of the Internet Explorer 'Internet Options' particularly in the security and privacy tabs and look for differences. You should also consider adding the site you are having problems with to your list of trusted sites in the security tab and configure it to always allow cookies for this site in the privacy tab. [Top]

Why Is Book-It On-Line Not A Real-time System?

Book-It On-Line is not a real-time system. It is not instantly updated any time a change is made in the office database, nor is the office database immediately updated any time that the on-line database is updated. Instead both systems are routinely synchronised in batch mode. Functions exists within Book-It that will seamlessly interface with FTP software to upload changed files to the website to bring the website database up to date. Because only a subset of information is sent this process is very quick particularly on ADSL connections making it feasible to perform several times per day if necessary. When updates are made on the website such as new member joins, member renewals, event bookings etc details are emailed to the office and should appear in your Outlook inbox within seconds. Once you are aware of them you can ask Book-It to automatically import the details into the office database for you. Depending on the volumes you are receiving you might do this in two or three batches per day or when each email is received. [Top]

What Are The Advantages Of A Batched Update System?

There are many advantages to having a batched update office and on-line system rather than one central on-line database that everyone works from as detailed below

Less reliance on ISP and Internet Connection

Because your office database works separately to your on-line database you are not at the mercy of your ISP and internet connection with regards to system availability. Even the most reliable ISPs experience problems and web sites go down for minutes, and occasionally hours or days. If this happens you can continue working in the office and although members and contacts cannot use the web system they can call the office and continue to pass on their requests to you by telephone, fax etc.

More Sophisticated Office Software

Although web technology has come on in leaps and bounds over recently years, software development tools still lag well behind tools that have been available for several years for local area network PC developments. This means that Book-It Office can provide very powerful features quickly and easily for back office operations which would take much longer to develop on-line even if the developments were feasible. Only a small section on Book-It functionality needs to be member / contact facing and the rest can quite happily reside locally.

Reduced Bandwidth and Processing Power Limitations

Book-It Office has many powerful features allowing you to create very sophisticated filtered sets of records (filtered on up to 15 fields) which can then be reported, mailed, emailed and so on. When performed on tens or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of records this can eat up considerable bandwidth and processing power. On a web site even with a 2Mb link many of the features regularly used on Book-It Office would start to become unfeasible whereas locally most uses are already using 100Mb LAN connections if not already moving to 1Gb connections and much of the processing is done on each workstation rather than farmed out to a central fileserver.

Cheaper Software

Due to the longer timescales involved in web database development, Book-It can be provided far cheaper than other real-time 100% on-line systems as only a small proportion of development goes into web features and the rest goes into the Book-It Office product. [Top]

What Does A Batched Update System Mean To Members and Contacts?

When you use the Book-It On-Line system you need to be clear to members and contacts that although the system provides them facilities to join, renew, book etc 24/7, their transactions are in fact simply being queued and will not be processed until you import them in the office. Book-It On-Line provides several opportunities for you to customise messages to this effect so that you can, for example, inform members at booking completion stage that their booking has not been confirmed but that you are simply confirming that a booking has been requested and that confirmation will be received shortly once you have accepted that booking. Obviously this leads to situations where the last slot on an event, for example, could be booked in the office by telephone at the same time as someone on the web tries to book it, however, our experience of customers using the software is that as long as this is explained at the booking stage then members and contacts are happy to accept this and appreciate that it might be better to book by telephone if there are very few slots left on an event. [Top]

Will Book-It On-Line Ever Become Realtime?

Yes, in the medium to long term we hope to use new web technology that will help us to synchronise the office and on-line databases closer so that ultimately the system will become a real-time system. [Top]

Why Do WS-FTP Pro Uploads Fail Occasionally?

We recommend WS-FTP Pro from Ipswitch to upload Book-It Office data to your web site for use by the Book-It On-Line module. WS-FTP Pro provides a batch synchronisation facility which can be used to seamlessly upload data through a simple button process within Book-It. From time to time these uploads may fail and you may have to restart them. We can only offer limited assistance with this as we have not developed the WS-FTP Pro software and direct contact with Ipswitch may prove much more useful, however, our experience to-date shows that transfers will usually be more successful if you use the Book-It 'lock website' function to prevent access to the web data files at least a minute or so before you perform the web data upload. This ensures that anyone who has previously been using the web pages, particularly if accessing them through a slower 56kb modem connection, will have finished loading their page and released the files so that WS-FTP Pro does not try to overwrite a file that is already in use.

Another improvement you can make is to find the 'retries' setting which dictates the number of times that the system will retry a failed transfer. You may need to check your WS-FTP Pro help system to locate this configuration option as it does change between versions, however, we recommend that you change the default setting of 0 to something like 10 or 15.

Another setting to experiment with according to Ipswitch is the 'passive mode' setting. Some websites prefer the use of passive mode, others not and some can use either. Try enabling or disabling the passive mode setting if you experience problems to see if it makes any difference.

There can be many other reasons for failure such as poor LAN connections, ISP problems, bottlenecks, damaged phone lines etc and you may need to speak with Ipswitch, your ISP, your web designer and your local PC support technician if you are unable to resolve the problems using the advice above.

Why do we use Protx as our PSP?

There are many PSPs (Payment Service Providers) that we could use with our Book-It On-Line software in order to ensure that all credit card payments are received securely. Some of the best known names probably include the likes of WorldPay and PayPal for example. We have initially linked up with Protx because in independent survey's conducted at www.electronic-payments.org.uk we found that Protx offered by far the lowest costs to all the other PSPs reviewed for the first batch of customers to adopt our on-line system and Protx comes very highly recommended by most of the UK high street banks. Initially costs were a flat fee of £20 per month for up to 1000 transactions per quarter with no setup fee or 10p per transaction for higher volumes. You should, however, consult their web site at www.protx.com for up to date charging information. You should be aware that a merchant services account which is authorised for on-line trading is required before setting up a Protx account and that their charges are in addition to your existing merchant services charges. We are happy to link to other PSPs if customers require this and the PSPs offer suitable integration routines to interface with our software, however, customers may have to pick up the development costs for this. [Top]

Do we receive any commission from Protx?

Yes, we are classed as a 'Protx Partner' and as such we receive a small commission from Protx for bringing customers to them. This commission is not in the form of a single referral fee but instead a very small fee for each transaction that the customer puts through Protx. We feel that it is important for customers to know this in order that they understand that it does not influence our choice of PSP. The commission is around 1p per transaction. Obviously it will therefore take a large number of transactions to generate any significant commissions. It is our intention to use any commissions generated to maintain the links to Protx as Protx upgrade their software in the future and Book-It software is upgraded in line with this. Commissions will also allow us to keep other development costs and On-Line support costs to an absolute minimum. It is also worth noting that most of the PSPs that we have reviewed would also pay similar if not better commissions and the choice of PSP therefore is not influenced by commission in any way. [Top]

Why do I get subscript out of bounds on return from Protx?

When returning from the Protx credit card authorisation site to your own site at the end of the checkout process you may on rare occasions receive a 'subscript is out of bounds' error message from your web site. This generally indicates that one or more of the files associated with the Protx integration and particularly your encryption key was not successfully uploaded when you last uploaded your Book-It pages (note - pages not data files). Repeating the pages upload will generally correct the problem. If not please contact us. In these instances customers cards will generally have been charged because the credit card authorisation has run smoothly, however, because the final part of your site's processes failed the member may not have been booked onto the event, had their joining application processed or had their renewal processed successfully. A fallback web failure email should, however, be generated to both the office and the member next time you update the system when it detects that an action was started but never completed so you should be able to trap this and react accordingly. [Top]

Why do characters in the Protx integration appear to change case?

When testing the integration with Protx you may find that certain characters mysteriously revert to upper case when all the characters surrounding them are lower case. Characters in the return URL generated after successful credit card authorisation may also convert themselves for no apparant reason and indeed some characters may even be dropped resulting in a page not found failure. The cause of such behaviour is usually that one or more characters in your encryption key have been entered incorrectly. Please check your key again with Protx paying particular attention to case and to differences between the number 0 and letter O. Ideally you should cut and paste the key straight from the Protx page to your Book-It software when first setting it up to avoiding typing mistakes. [Top]

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e37' [Microsoft][ODBC Visual FoxPro Driver]Not a table.

When using FTP software to upload fresh copies of data to the Book-It On-Line system on your web site, occasionally files being uploaded may experience transmission errors and become corrupt in transit. If this occurs then the ODBC driver may report a 'Not a table' error as above. The error will usually pinpoint a program name and line number where the error was detected which can help us to detect which file is corrupt, however, we would normally suggest that you simply lock your database and perform another 'data upload' to overcome the problem. If the problem persists it may be because something has locked the file in question on your web site and it cannot be overwritten with a good version. If this is the case, we suggest that you wait 5 minutes or so from locking your website before attempting the upload again which will allow whatever is locking the file to timeout and release it. Very occasionally the file experiencing the problem may be a file that permanently resides on your website rather than one that is uploaded on a regular basis. If this is the case you will need to contact us in order that we can identify the problem file and repair it using specialist data repair tools that we have. Please try several data uploads first before contacting us if you experience this error message. [Top]