TntMPD 3.0.4 (ready for Beta?)

While I am looking at a compete refresh of the TntMPD Help before the full release this summer, before this Beta goes out I want to make a quick guide that describes new features or major changes. Specifically, a major one is the steps a person needs to do to take advantage of the new wife contact features (her own mobile phone, email, etc.).

Forgive the clicking sound. Sent from my olive green Bell rotary phone.

I agree with Bob that some sort of Transition Guide or Quick Start Guide would be really helpful to have in place for a wider roll out.

End of next week? That much time, eh? :)

Is there anything specific that you (all of you) think the users will need to know about this upgrade? I mean, "NEED" to know? Things that a user will need to manually do after upgrading to 3.0?

Yes, I want to highlight (in brief) all of the many new featurese and enhancements, but certain things like the password requirement and the new "wife" contact features

There are 3 things I can think of for sure:

1. The switch from one couple contact to two separate contacts (within one TntMPD contact). That is, the wife having her own email and phone numbers (and to a lesser extent, some separate business or other address info).

2. The new password system

3. The new organization contact and business address fields (e.g., for Organization contacts, users may want to move the c/o out of the Business Street Address block and into the "Organization Contact Person" field).

By the way, for both #1 and #3, the instructions will be to do a series of lookups to find those values, and then how to manually move them.

Is there any way to put in a pre-upgrade screen that will highlight essential changes--or put a hyperlink to the TntMPD help/downloads/whatever that will let them know how to find these key tips for the upgrade?

In past upgrades, the users were "on their own" when it came to figuring out the new features. But with an upgrade this major, I think we need to be more pro-active in communicating the changes--especially because users should LOVE them! Let's celebrate them!

4. Merging two contacts together. It is conceivable that some users created separate TntMPD contacts for husbands and wives in order to work around the Outlook-to-mobile problem of combined phone numbers and/or combined email for merge. I have certainly thought of doing it myself from time to time, so I have to think some did it. So how to "undo" this by "merging" the contacts using that new feature is a good one.

5. Updating Newsletter preferences to take advantage of the new newsletter selection.

Yes, a link on the upgrade screen would be perfect.

Hi Troy,

 It looks like TntMPD changed the way it assigns ContactIDs in the Contacts table.  I noticed that my 3.0 table has only positive values, while the 2.x DB had negative values as well.  Am I seeing this correctly?  If so, are they simply given new, positive random IDs?  Are other tables affected in similar ways?  (History appears to have negative IDs still...)

 Thanks!  MIST for TntMPD 3.0 will be out soon =)

Tom

I should have done more research first =)  It appears that the absolute value of the former ID is used.  Is that right?  If so, what happens if there's a conflict with an existing record?

Thanks Troy!

Troy,

I noticed two things today.  The first was while using the internal browser under the community section.  I was following a few links to Google to figure out how to make my Google the default email from TnT, side note...any suggestions for a Mac?  I noticed that the forward and backward arrows were not visible.  I really like that new feature, very helpful.  I didn't do any hard looking for them just noticed they were gone.

The second thing I noticed is tat the smaller black text on the community section is harder to read.  It almost looks like the lines are various thicknesses so it a little hard to read.  I'm using a MacBook Pro 15 inch Late 2011.  I also have 3.0.4 running.  Do you have any suggestions for better settings to help read the text more easily?  Everything else looks great.

Thank you for all the hard work you put into TnT.  It is a wonderful tool and the new features/updates are great.

Hi Troy. Thanks for filling me in.  Good thinking regarding the deterministic means of fixing Contact ID collisions!  Out of curiosity, why did you decide to eliminate negative IDs in that table?

Hi Bob,

Regarding what's helpful for transitioning, I think some more info about the new MailChimp sync would be awesome.  I know that some of our users have been afraid of the MailChimp sync in v2 because it seemed to simple / dangerous.

Jason --

How about you write the MailChimp help and I'll clean it up? :) I haven't started using MailChimp yet. (This may be a good time for ME to get started...) If you're interested, just write everything you know, or step-by-step, or whatever you think a user would need to know. I'll take care of the rest.

Troy - "spouses as the negative" -- that could sound pretty bad in the wrong context.  ;)

Bob - I'm pretty new to MailChimp and haven't tried using the TntMPD <--> Mailchimp sync myself yet.

Troy - a Mailchimp article would be AWESOME!  From my limited understanding, I totally agree that TntMPD 3 will really bring people into the fold on syncing with MailChimp (and on upgrading to TntMPD 3), but we need some way to demonstrate its greatness to help them overcome their fear.  Just saying, "It's better, I promise!" isn't good enough for all users.  :)