[kdewey]

I am the box office manager at a theatre that has been using PE for 2 1/2 years now. We started with PE when the product was brand new and there were lots of things that hadn't been figured out. Blackbaud has done a lot since then to make the product more user friendly, but there is also still a lot that needs to be done.

For your box office staff, PE is the easiest ticketing system to train on and use that I have ever seen. The ticket sales process is a snap.

As far as reporting goes, this is an area that still needs lots of work. Our IT manager has spent a lot of time with support learning the "back end" of PE and is now able to pull information from there, export it to Access and create his own reports. It is not a perfect system and often takes a few tries before we get the numbers we're looking for.

We integrated our systems a year and a half ago and then a few months later had to turn it off because it was causing so many problems. They went back to the drawing board and we integrated again about six months ago. Since then it seems to be working much better. Names and addresses sync between the two systems and donations that are entered into PE show up in RE. There are still a lot of things that the integration does not do, but Blackbaud is aware of these things and has been fixing things with each new release.

We went through a lot the last two years and finally this year (our tickets went on sale in February) I felt like we had the system working in a way that was manageable. I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have and to pass along some of the fun work arounds that I've had to create to get things done.

Good luck!