New! 2-Way sync with Google Calendar

We're happy to announce the public availability of 2-way synchronization with Google Calendar!

Your can now synchronize in real time, and hands-free all your Bookeo appointments and classes, tours, workshops directly with selected calendars in your Google Calendar account.

At the same time, you can view in Bookeo your appointments from your calendars in your Google Calendar account. The integration is complete, flexible, and completely automatic! Just set and forget.

Google Calendar (either standalone or as part of Google Apps) is by far the most popular web calendaring application out there, so it was only natural that we integrated your appointment scheduling directly into Google Calendar.

This integration goes well beyond the old iCal-based synchronization, because:

• your Bookeo appointments appear in real time in Google Calendar, without delays. On the other hand, iCal sync to Google can have delays of up to 24 hours (a well known Google issue, unfortunately)
• the synchronization is 2-way

Of course Google Calendar is also tightly integrated with all Android phones, which means that this new feature will also let you sync Bookeo with your Android device. A big bonus for mobile workers.

So, how does it look?

The looks are those already very familiar:

the same events in Bookeo and Google Calendar

How does it work?
For full details on how to configure your 2-way synchronization, see the dedicated article in our help portal: http://help.bookeo.com/customer/portal/articles/104371-2-way-sync-with-google-calendar

This was an important feature, which required extensive beta testing before public launch. We wish to thank all customers who volunteered to beta test. Good job!

New features, small and big

We continuously work to add new features and small tweaks to Bookeo.
However since Bookeo is a web based application, and users do not need to do anything to upgrade the software, sometimes many of the smaller improvements are not noticed.

Very often they're too small to merit a full blog post, so we'll try to keep a weekly post to summarize the smaller improvements that were released during the week.

In the last 2 weeks we released the following:

• option to show the number of available seats of a class/tour/workshop, when they're shown to the customer as listing . This was a popular request from tour operators, thanks for the heads up! Note that Bookeo will automatically hide the Book button if there are not enough seats for a tour, but sometimes it's nice to see the availability anyway.
• more customization options for the booking interface. You can now change the color of the black title bar, the color of the buttons, and hide the icon from the buttons. This in addition to all the customization options already available
• now all custom fields are always included in booking reports
• non-manager users are no longer allowed to import/export customers
• post-to-facebook and post-to-twitter now work even with accented characters
• on rare occasions, on slow computers, the bottom lines of the booking widget may have been cut off. this is now fixed
• printing of a class/tour manifest now fixed for IE9

real-time tour availability

How often do we upgrade Bookeo?

This is a question that we're asked often. The answer is... very often! Sometimes even every day, but more commonly at least once a week.

Most likely however you will never notice it...

Bookeo Help Portal officially launched

As of today, the new official Bookeo Help Portal is launched!

We've been working hard in the last few weeks in writing a ton of documentation articles and step by step tutorials, with rich screenshots and usage examples, and the result is an extensive portal that guides new and existing users through the many features offered by Bookeo.

The address of the portal is: help.bookeo.com and you can also reach it from your Bookeo account by simply clicking on the 'get help' link at the top.

the new Bookeo Help Portal

What's more, most pages in Bookeo will now show direct links to specific articles that provide detailed help about the page / feature you're viewing. Make sure to look for those 'Learn more' and 'Help' links everywhere!

help right where you need it

Obviously our direct, personal support is always at hand, and will now be based on a professional ticketing system. This will help us to keep a full history of every interaction we have with you, so that our support will be even more precise and personalized - we will always have full view of your full history of questions, requests and answers. You can contact us through one of the contact methods offered in the portal, or at help@bookeo.com .
The old support email address will still be working too.

you can always contact us

So please take some time to explore our new help portal, and as usual do not hesitate to contact us directly, through the portal or via email at help@bookeo.com, for any question.

Again, the address of the new Bookeo Help Portal is:

help.bookeo.com