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Year #1 myHMS Development Achievements by AutoClerk
August 30, 2013
Merchant PCI compliance - via use of the PCI-certified Shift4 payment gateway. For hoteliers that do not have the myHMS credit card interface, 4Words (from Shift4) must be used to retrieve the full confidential credit card number stored on Shift4 servers. Retrieval has recently been made more user friendly by automatically highlighting the 4 words generated when the mouse is clicked on this field. Note, to simplify matters even further- if your hotel gets a credit card interface then you will not need to use 4Words whatsoever. The added cost for an interface is a $500 one-time fee, plus an added $15 per month (payable to Shift4).
Improved performance and reliability- the myHMS data-center was moved from New Mexico to a new state-of-the-art SuperNAP7 Switch data center in Las Vegas, which is one of the world’s most advanced technology ecosystems and serves many Fortune 1000 companies.
Two-way interface to Genares CRS- The myHMS to Genares interface has recently been made more robust by detecting when rates are updated in myHMS and immediately sending the updated rates to the Genares CRS system. This means that the wait time between PMS/CRS updates is greatly reduced and users can change pricing for last minute bookings to maximize revenue.
Mobile Device Friendly- the main navigation bar was changed so that is can be accessed by clicking on the section to expand it. This is a very useful feature as customers switch to mobile devices the application has adapted to be used and useful on new mobile platforms.
Cross Browser Support - myHMS now can be used on variety of browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
Smart Rate Seasons - In the past if a user wished to create a new rate season that happened to fall within the dates of an existing season, it was cumbersome to add the new season because the user would have to edit the initial season, add the new season, then add another season to bridge the gap. MyHMS is now enhanced so that when a user inputs the new season, myHMS automatically edits the initial, adds the new season, then adds a bridge season to fill the gap.
Tape Chart improvements- including performance improvements and drag/drop functionality was restored and improved to work across most browser platforms. Also new color scheme has been implemented to make the tape chart more readable.
Old Tape Chart:
New Tape Chart:
Group functionality - In the past, overbooking of individual (non-group) reservations was taking away from hard group allocations, without the user even knowing about it. Now a warning message is given to that lets user know when they are attempting to overbook a room type that has been assigned to a group. The user can then choose to override the warning message and continue with the overbooking. Moreover, and most importantly, if the user continues with the overbooking then there is no taking away of inventory from the hard group allocations.
Length of Stay (LOS) restrictions were added as part of the update messages sent from myHMS to the Genares CRS system.
Emailing guest folios - a guest folio can now be emailed directly from the myHMS application. The folio is sent as a PDF attachment via email. Users have the ability to use the default email address on the guest profile or manually enter an email address before sending.
Expanding limits - Previously a user could only retrieve up to 100 results when using the search function or advanced search functionality. This has been improved to yield up to 10,000 results at a time, the advantage of this is users can easily “data mine” the application and pull out useful info such as email address’ of past guests.
Lodgenet movie system interface- Logic was added so that users with a Lodgenet movie system can now interface directly with myHMS. This means that when movies are ordered from a guest’ room the charges will automatically post in the guest folio.
Out-of-Order bug Fixes & enhancements- Users were previously able to input a past system date in the Out of Order input box, which result in an error and the user not able to update the room status. This was fixed so that past system dates can be set as Out of Order without issue.
Previously a user could only set a room as Out of Order for 1 day or date range. This functionality has been improved so that a user can set a room Out of Order over a set of 3 separate dates or date ranges. The Out of Order functionality was improved so that it can now overbook a room type, whereas in the past the Out of Order functionality would not work if there was no inventory available during the selected date or date range.
Java vulnerability removed - Use of Java within the browser was replaced by AJAX. This was beneficial because Java has several known security issues.
Dual Node Application - MyHMS has been split into two separate nodes which allows for new myHMS software versions to be deployed by users simply logging out of myhMS, and then immediately logging back on, so downtime is only a few seconds for a version upgrade.