Today we launched SimpleSeating Pro into private beta.

The intended targets for SimpleSeating Pro are event venues and event planners with clients that will be doing their own seating chart, but where the planner/venue might want to have access to help out and/or approve the work the client is doing.

Event managers can monitor the progress of their clients’ seating plans through the admin panel and send email reminders to the client to keep them on track, but the real magic is in the templates.

The planner and or venue manager can create templates for their clients that match the venue size and layout perfectly. This keeps the implementation easy and most importantly accurate on the day of the event.

As many of you have pointed out, our list uploader has been less than optimal since we added it. Ok, we admit it, it sucked!

But not anymore. I updated the process today to catch all the random errors that we used to encounter and added a step where you can map the data in your file to what we’re looking for. I hope that this will cut the frustrations down significantly.

Let me know by sending an email to answers@simpleseating.com if anything seems off. Happy seating!

We’ve been working hard on a big update and I was thinking that we could release a lot of the little stuff in the that release. But I’ve realized that we may have bitten off more than we can chew. So I’ve backed up and started working on the little things to solve some of your most requested items.

Today we launched 12-seat tables. We tested them, but let us know if you find anything weird.

Also I fixed a problem with the seat numbering, so it is possible that some of your guests will get shifted, but this fix will make it much easier to interpert the printed seating chart.

Let us know if you have any problems, answers@simpleseating.com.

Thanks,
Steve

Some of you may have noticed some changes to the visual design of the site yesterday. There is more to this than purely cosmetic. The simplified layout removes the admittedly annoying pop-up window for signup and login and makes room for an expanded canvas.

We hope you enjoy the new visual design, and keep an eye out for a some new features coming very soon.

As part of joining the Gangplank incubator, SimpleSeating is becoming its own entity and parting ways with its parent company Foolish Software. This means a few changes, most of which won’t affect you the customer. However, this is one of the times that it will. SimpleSeating updates, status notices, and other goodies will now be posted on this blog instead of the ThinkFoolish blog.

We’re also on twitter, as simpleseating. You can follow us there for near-real time notifications.

Lastly, we’re on GetSatisfaction.com. This is a great place to request new features, report a bug, provide feedback or otherwise just connect with us.

Thanks for checking out SimpleSeating.