Today we released a big VELUMrent upgrade which includes a feature that will allow your customers and agencies to make reservations on their own through Public View. And as requested, they’ll still have to wait for you to review and confirm all pending reservation requests.

The procedure is fast and simple:

- In order for a public user to create a new reservation request he needs to click on any empty space on the Reservations calendar, enter his/hers contact details (which will be automatically stored in your Customers Address Book) and click the Create button.

- E-mail notifications are then sent to him/her and you.

- You now have to log into VELUMrent and navigate to a third tab called Notifications on your home page. There you will see all current request that have to be dealt with (there is also a red notification number in that tab if there are new notifications waiting for you).

- From here you can see all relevant reservation details and accept or deny any reservation with only one click. But if needed you can also open and edit any reservation as any other reservation in VELUMrent and then save the changes.

- There are no notifications to customers at this point once you accept or deny their reservation so don’t forget to notify them personally about your decision.

We would also like to thank everyone for their feature and other suggestions that helped shape VELUMrent in what it is today. And we would also like encourage all other VELUMrent users to comment on what they like, dislike and want to see in future upgrades so we can make VELUMrent better for you and possibly the only solution you’ll need for you business.

Today we upgraded VELUMrent to a new version and the biggest news is the implementation of  a completely free account (so no more 30 days trials and unavailable accounts if you downgrade your plan).

The Free VELUMrent plan has all the features as the paying plans and the only limitation it has is the number of properties it can show. This number is limited to three.

We also added some new features, some we already planned to include and other were Yours feature suggestions. To check them out please view our change log here.

This way we’d like to thank everyone for they feedback and encourage you evan more to let us know what you think and need so we can improve our product and help your businesses through VELUMrent.

Best regards.

All your work until now is backed up as always, so no data will be lost. And if you enter some new information during this 24 hours we can not guarantee that it won’t be lost so please backup the data on your end as well.

Thank you for understanding.

We had quite a few busy weeks this and past month developing new features for VELUMrent and preparing the site for redesign.

The site redesign should be done in one or two weeks. To be notified in time about those changes please follow us on Twitter (this is the fastest way to receive news about things that are happening with Constructive Code and VELUMrent).

So what’s new in VELUMrent version 1.1.0?

All together there are more than 10 new features and more than 11 bug fixes available in this release.

New added features will make working with new and existing reservations much faster and simpler. Now by clicking the date on every reservation will open this reservation for editing.

By clicking the empty space on the reservation grid you’ll automatically open a new reservation dialog with the dates and the unit predefined to the clicked space.
While editing or creating a new reservation we’ve also included a quick search field for customers so you can easily and quickly find the customer you’ve been looking for.

We’ve also added couple of new settings in the Settings menu so now you can choose between 10 new colors for confirmed and unconfirmed reservations or change the date format to suit your needs.

Public View has also been changed so it looks exactly the same as the the reservation grid you are using. Evan the fast switching languages are available there for customers to choose from.

To see which other features and bug fixes were included in this upgrade check our VELUMrent change log at http://www.constructivecode.com/velumrent-change-log/.

You can use this page to see all past and future changes to the application as we make them.

By now all VELUMrent user accounts should have been upgraded to this release. This and all feature upgrades are free.

Let us know how do you like the new features and what other features would you like to see in the future releases.

We’re looking forward hearing from you.

If you are reading this you are most likely a “connected” person and well aware of the benefits that can come by putting your business online, especially in businesses like ours (renting and booking businesses).

And one of the most important things on the web that will help you be successful is advertising and getting as many people possible familiar with your services and products. These days the problem are, more than ever, to get the desired search engine ranking, page hits and of course increase the number of leads. And all of that costs a great deal of money, especially getting new leads.

So wouldn’t it be great if someone gave you a chance to advertise for free and not pay for a single click on your ad? Yes it would and LongUrl.net will give you just that.

LongUrl.net in its core function works like any other URL shortening service out there. But there is a twist to this idea. Well with every URL you shorten using their service you’ll get a chance to put your own ad that will be show up at the top of the screen once users open this URL. Here is an example LongUrl link I’ve made so you can see it in action: http://longurl.net/ccode.

So if you are like me, and you daily post a lot of links (I do about 20 of them) why not use them as free ads for your service of choice instead of wasting them and giving free hits to linked websites.

As there are no restrictions where you can post those links places like Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, forums and other will become your free advertising places and people who read, follow and re-tweet them will help you redistribute the ad.
And who ever finds your ad interesting and clicks on it doesn’t cost you a dime but still counts as a potential customer :).

If you start enjoying this service there are also some paid models available. More information about those can be found here.

Hopefully this service will help you save some money during these hard times and bring some valuable customers.

If you have some great tip that can help others please let us know and will post it here, or let you write something about it.

Before I start allow me to clarify what is VELUMrent.

VELUMrent is web based rental application. If you own a small or mid-sized business that rents houses, apartments, boats, cars, …, VELUMrent might be just the thing you are looking for. As VELUMrent was in public beta until yesterday it couldn’t be used for any regular business, but now when the official 1.0. release is out it is ready for everyone who is in a need or interested in such solution to try it out and use.

All features that we intended implementing in this first release are here. To see which features VELUMrent offers visit the Features page. Even better way of experiencing those features is to try them by registering for VELUMrent’s free 30 day trial. To register for this trial simple follow this link to VELUMrent’s login screen, click Register and fill out the required information. The whole process should not take more than 60 seconds.

If you are interested in VELUMren’s pricing check out the Pricing and Sign up page for more details. You’ll see that our subscription plans won’t be hard on your budget. We even included some special discounts on longer lasting subscription plans to award your trust.

We also have our first official customer that will transfer their business completely to VELUMrent by the end of this week. Hopefully you’ll be hearing more about this in one of our future blog posts.

What is next on our schedule? Well, we intend to concentrate more resources on marketing to get the whole thing going and to get some momentum. So if you are interested in posting some VELUMrent banners on your site or writing some reviews about it please let us know :). We are also continuing with development of VELUMrent and improving it even more. We have many new features we are looking forward implementing and if you have your own suggestions or requests please let us know and we will consider every one of your requests. Off course all paying accounts will receive those features for free in future VELUMrent upgrades.

That would be all for now. Don’t forget to follow our updates on Twitter or to contact us about any questions you might have.

Currently the beta version, with all features that will come in the 1.0. version, is available for public testing here:

http://www.velumrent.com/CustomerLogIn.aspx

At the moment we are polishing some features like Public desktop, Languages and UI text so they work as we originally planned. Once that is finished, sometime next week, VELUMrent will get officially released to our customers (You).

If you have any suggestions, questions or bug reports that you found during testing please let us know and we will address them all immediately.

Thank would be all for now. Next week we will have a reason to write a longer and more detailed blog post :). So stay tuned.

First public release of VELUMrent

It took us a week longer that we originally expected to publicly release the alpha version of VELUMrent, and it is finally here.
This delay was not caused by the delay in our development process so you can still expect the official release date to be set for beginning of March (make sure you add it to your calendar).

We’ll upgrade the public version of VELUMrent every 5-7 days with new features that we have planned for version 1.0. For about next two weeks this version of VELUMrent will grow into a pre-release beta version of the final product.

In the current release you can see how the design of the main user interface will look like (there will be some additional changes to it, but overall look and fell will stay as it is. And the current interface language is in Croatian instead of English.), how we decided to visually represent reservation, drag and drop feature, and more. You still can’t create or modify reservation at this point. But we have included a couple of reservations for you to see how will they look like and to test the smooth drag and drop feature our developers are so proud of :).

Feel free to send us any feedback, good or bad, you have about VELUMrent at this stage of development. We will review all your comments and address all bug reports we receive from you.

What else are we doing?

The main thing we are working/discussing about at the moment is our future pricing policy. As it now looks we will have very basic and simple pricing models with (what we hope are going to be) very competitive prices.

We are also translating and reforming some texts for Croatian version of VELUMrent site. As we will have different marketing and sales strategy for our home (Croatian) market the Site and the texts on this site will be specially adapted to suit this market.
We would also like to remind you to follow our updates on Twitter. This way you’ll receive all news and updates about VELUMrent as they happen and when they happen.

However this does not mean that this site is fully completed. We will add a lot more of new content and other product information to it as soon as the first public beta of VELUMrent is going to be released. And at the current schedule you may evan see the first Beta of VELUMrent at the beginning of February.

To make sure you don’t miss this Beta release please subscribe to our free e-mail Newsletter, read this Blog for new announcements or follow our Twitter updates.

In the mean time if you’ll have any questions regarding VELUMrent or some other topic please feel free to contact us.

Stay tuned.