Audio Transcript
Announcer: Hey everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts and everything MagHub related. And now your host, MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.
Tom Bellen: Hello everyone and welcome to MagHub’s 7.5 release podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bellen, Product Manager for MagHub, here with Zach Gilbert, marketing director. Zach, how are you doing today?
Zach Gilbert: I’m good.
Tom Bellen: Fantastic. So we’re here to talk again about the 7.5 release and we’re in love with this release because love is in the air because it’s almost Valentine’s Day. Isn’t that very exciting? Zach, do you have anything exciting planned for Valentine’s Day?
Zach Gilbert: So we already celebrated Valentine’s Day because we do that kind of stuff and we can’t keep secrets from each other. So my fiancee bought me a huge LEGO set, because we’re nerds too, and she got some jewelry, so that’s my Valentine’s Day plan.
Tom Bellen: So what is a huge LEGO set?
Zach Gilbert: So I think this one is actually … so anyone that doesn’t know, one of our developers here and I have a close relationship built on LEGO’s and we both have built the world’s largest LEGO set for sale, which is the Millennium Falcon, just so you know, and this is … it’s called NINJAGO City and it’s about 5000 pieces, so it’s about 3000 less than the Millennium Falcon.
Tom Bellen: So I saw part of that movie, I know there’s a LEGO movie, NINJAGO, I don’t know much about the history of that but saw it the other day, so that’s cool.
Zach Gilbert: Yeah.
Tom Bellen: I mean you do it early for that reason, we often don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day on Valentine’s Day, mainly because … two reasons; one, my wife works evenings, a lot of times she works on Valentine’s evening, so we don’t do it that way. The other reason is I kind of hate going out on Valentine’s Day, for a couple of reasons. I used to work as a waiter on Valentine’s Day, it was terrible because you have all these people who never go out to eat and they go out and they don’t tip. And usually, as a foodie, restaurants also have the Valentine’s Day menu, which is limiting and I also think they’re just getting rid of food that’s about to go bad as well.
Tom Bellen: But it’s also this year not going out because my wife’s working that night but in this office we’re actually doing a Whole 30. So Zach conned me into doing this, or maybe it was Jeremy, I don’t know, so around this Whole 30 thing, which basically means we can’t eat food that people enjoy, and I think that’s the basic rule? But no, not really, but it’s very specific on what you can eat so it’s hard to go out to eat without having to be that person at the restaurant who’s like, “Excuse me, what are things cooked in?” Because if it cooks in something then the whole thing’s ruined and your body shuts down or something like that. So I don’t know if there’s any Whole 30 restaurants or what do you when you go out to on Whole 30?
Zach Gilbert: So I mean there is a couple of comments on that; first, we are in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so, I mean, the easiest place to do Whole 30 would be a place like Ann Arbor, Michigan where there’s a lot of restaurants and health food stores everywhere you can walk to. So I don’t think it’s really that bad. Cooking food though is kind of a pain, I mean honestly I’m kind of an old fashioned person anyway so I have steak, egg, and potatoes every morning, which is all Whole 30 approved. So I don’t find it that hard, as much as everybody else seems to complain about it, so.
Tom Bellen: Hey, I noticed a little disdain when you mentioned we’re in Ann Arbor, I think it was some anger towards the Ann Arbor and resentment, which I can understand. But you know one thing we don’t have resentment or anger towards, the 7.5 release. Look at that transition, another top of the line transition. So for this one, which we’re also in love with, coming out one day before Valentine’s Day, a lot of exciting things in this release. The bigger parts is obviously we’ve been rolling out the New Orders beta. The first rollout was a lot of interface and some process stuff, not a lot of different functionality, we’re getting some good feedback on that, again, there’s some things on the interface and the workflow we wanna tweak but one of the big reasons why we went through this was so we could add additional features that people have been requesting for a long time, which, when you have an old house, an old foundation, it’s hard to build things on top of that. So, going back, this gave us a lot of flexibility to do some new exciting things.
Tom Bellen: So in this release, with permissions, people are gonna be able to add 100% items, or line items to orders that are 100%, which has been something that people have wanted for a while. We’ve added the ability to do what we call ad hoc grouping which allows you to take whichever line items you want out on order, group them together, name it, maybe you wanna call it a media campaign, 2019, something like that, print, digital, call it that. You can, again, hide some of that pricing so you can only show a total price and if you’re selling more package-y type items you can have a new display on contract templates where it could all show nicely together, digital, print and services in one box, table, and then even set it to invoice it together, so really kind of streamline that.
Tom Bellen: You can also do things now in terms of marking some items on the order to require pre-pay, so if you want your advertisers, customers, to pay for the first ad in a run cycle, mark that item, when they approve it through your Client Center they can then just put it on their credit card, that will be invoiced and paid right during the order approval process. And we’ve now, again, re-added installments to this version of beta orders because it wasn’t on the first part so you now you have installments on that side too. So a lot of exciting things with the orders and again, we have some other cool features that we’re working on now in this month and then that’s gonna lead to March when we really cut the tie, if you will, and everything will be going through new beta orders and we’ll just have a link back to old orders.
Tom Bellen: So a couple of months to go, we really like the progress, but that’s not the only thing in this release, as we did announce last month about our forum and selling tickets. So being able to do promo codes for the e-commerce side was helpful for us, we’ve added that, so that’s in there. We’ve also made some changes to how our artwork reminder email templates go, I mean this was one of the items that we got from our last year’s forum was a lot of people wanted more templates for sending artwork reminders, so now you can do that with being able to duplicate a template, create it so you can have multiple things in your drop downs for production, report and missing ads reports. And there’s also a couple of tags added specifically for digital reminders where you can add the start date, end date to a digital artwork reminder and now, with our digital offset date on digital ad sizes, you can even do more with that if you have different sizes that have different requirements. And there’s also a new ad specifications field on ad sizes, so each one of your templates can be even more individualized, knowing if your requirements for this type of ad are different than the other, it’s gonna really just help to make the artwork reminding process a lot more geared towards specific ad types. So that’s been in this release.
Tom Bellen: We’ve also made some changes right now back into the page layout page and that’s actually leading to some exciting things we’re doing with our InDesign work. So we’ve had the InDesign plugin for a while, we got a lot of good feedback on that, being able to bulk upload PDFs was one that we’re working on, being able to have a better sync between InDesign and our systems to doing things like some auto placement. So one of the things with the page layout that we updated to allow you to change ad types is that kind of leads to what we’re gonna be releasing here, by the end of the February of March is our InDesign plugin version 2.0 with Creative Cloud 2019 supported and some better links between the two.
Tom Bellen: And then also some other items, I think one of the other things towards the late was updating one of our reports, the sales rep goals metrics reports to actually now better filtering for service schools too. So there’s a lot of other things in this release, it’s actually a very exciting release for some of the changes that we’ve made, a lot of big changes with the orders, I think over a total of 70 or so tickets on it, and we’re still working on it right now, so, overall, a very, very exciting release so far. So.
Tom Bellen: Zach, I don’t know if you’ve had anything … well, I’m assuming the promo code was the most exciting thing in this release because you used it?
Zach Gilbert: It’s true, yeah, the promo code is good, so everybody listening, make sure that you use the promo code ‘WINNERWINNER’ when checking out for the forum, you get 20% off your tickets. It’s only going to go on til February 28th, I do believe this is the only discount that we are launching for this forum so if you don’t get it before that you’re not gonna save any money. So I think that was my biggest thing.
Tom Bellen: Oh man, not gonna save any money.
Zach Gilbert: I know, well.
Tom Bellen: That’s crazy. Anything else exciting that you wanna talk about with the forum that we have coming up? I guess we’re working on finalizing the agenda for that-
Zach Gilbert: So that’s finalized actually.
Tom Bellen: Okay.
So you guys can actually go to our MagHub website and go down to the footer where it says the MagHub Fall Forum or click at pretty much any link that I’ve had in social media posts for the past two weeks. You can actually go to our new website that actually has the whole forum agenda and it goes from Monday through Thursday, it talks about everything you could possibly need to know; where we’re gonna be, what’s included, who’s doing what topics. There’s actually a brief description on every single topic because a lot of people wanted that early, so we’re doing it, what? Six, seven months early this year. So we are definitely earlier this year than we were last year, so check it out for the agenda, I’m also sending it as an email to every one of our clients, so you’ll see it shortly.
Tom Bellen: All right, that’s exciting. Part of that was stalling because I just realized I have to give a movie trivia and I didn’t really prepare one, so now we’re gonna go off the cuff here as I saw this the other day, it was on TV, and I actually saw this when I was not living in this city. So we’ll make this a two part, but there’s a movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, and that was actually … so this is a bit of personal history and movie trivia, is … again, you can answer this, if you tweet us @MagHub with the answer you can get the prize, but you can say what city was that movie based in, which is also where I used to live for a while, a period of time, and then, again, what two famous actors in that, their relationship, were they going back and forth on whether or not to be married? And as we’re in this time of love and marriage and all that stuff, so there are two very famous actors and their relationship was contingent on one wanting to get married and the other one didn’t and how that goes. So answer either one, again, kind of the love story, I was forced to see that movie probably around Valentine’s Day with my wife, so that’s the trivia question.
Zach Gilbert: What are your cat facts?
Tom Bellen: Yeah, see, I knew you were gonna throw the cat fact at me in that case. So, okay, so here’s the cat fact, it’s kind of a trivia thing too, I’ll just throw it out there. I was watching Netflix this weekend, I was watching Russian Dolls or Russian Doll, that movie; what is the name of the cat that the main person is trying to find in that movie? And I realized this needs to be a fact, not a question, so the cat’s name is Oatmeal, that’s all. So, if anyone’s interested, it’s an interesting show so far, it’s kind of a Groundhog Day-ish type of thing where this person’s reliving the same birthday over and over again and she keeps dying. It’s not really a major spoiler because in the first episode it’s known that that’s what’s happening, and anyway, one of the first scenes where she first dies is when she goes to try and find her cat, runs across the street, dies in that situation and the cat’s name is Oatmeal.
Zach Gilbert: Isn’t that a movie too that’s coming out, the exact same thing where a girl keeps dying over and over and …?
Tom Bellen: Well there was My Death day, Birthday, but that was a few years ago, where she kept dying on her birthday.
Zach Gilbert: There’s another movie, I see it all over Twitter now, where this woman is dying over and over-
Tom Bellen: You mean people are being copycats?
Zach Gilbert: Yeah, gotcha, nice.
Tom Bellen: Well I mean, at the end of the day, unlike MagHub with all of our original new features that we do all the time, Hollywood just produces the same thing over and over and over and over and over again, so we’re ahead of the game in that case.
Zach Gilbert: All right, so that’ll end up today’s episode of Tom’s Tips Podcast, so thank you everybody for joining us today.
Tom Bellen: Thank you very much and have a lovely Valentine’s Day.
