A Summary of All our Latest Feature Updates

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and the associated shelter in place orders, we’ve been updating our product at a rapid pace to ensure our customers have all the tools they need to continue to succeed as much of the world accelerates their transition to working, playing and exercising on-line.

While we’ve kept our customers updated via our product newsletter as we’ve continued to build out enhancements, we’ve fallen a bit behind on the blog posts. As we enter the next chapter of the crisis and all of our customer’s businesses evolve, I wanted to outline in one place all the changes we’ve made, to ensure our customers get all the benefit of everything we offer, along with the overall philosophy of how everything ties together for you and your students.

Broadcast Links

Our first update was our new feature we call Broadcast links. This allows you to use the video platform of your choice, whether it’s Zoom, Google Meet, Vimeo Live or anything else, alongside the Tula Payments and Registration system.

Event Recordings

We upgraded our Audio, enabling allow our customers to upload both audio and video files. This allows you to provide both audio and video available for on-demand classes for your members.

Custom Registration Messages & New Registration Settings

We upgraded our registrations system to allow you to provide additional, custom instructions, anytime anyone registers for an event. In addition, we added a new registration setting, allowing you to turn-off guest access, allowing you to require students to log in prior to registering and paying for classes.

Weekly Memberships

We introduced a new membership option, giving our customers a way to provide memberships that provide access all the benefits of our latest features designed for “unlimited” pass holders, while offering a more digestible payment option for their student base.

Waiver Update & Reset Option

Many of our customers reported wanting to be able to get new waivers signed from their students. Our customers can now update their waivers, and when they do, all students will be required to sign the newly updated waiver, bringing them current with the studio’s current policies.

Custom Subdomains

All customers can now set up custom subdomains for their website widgets, further tightening the integration between our website and yours. This addresses some important updates Safari made around their default security settings, AND also provides all our customers a way to provide their students with the Student Mobile Web App hosted on their own domain. As an example, our studio students now save https://domoreyoga.tulayoga.net/student on their phone to quickly access the studio schedule, broadcast links and on-demand classses.

ALL THESE OFFERINGS TOGETHER

For our customers, all of these features together, along with their physical studio locations, give them a complete, full stack of options for providing the services they offer to their communities.

In-Person Classes.
Live Broadcast Classes.
On-Demand Audio.
On-Demand Video.

And all of it living on your domain, under your brand and your studio name, giving you all the tools you need to compete.

As venture capital pours billions of dollars into Marketplaces like Mindbody, and apps like Headspace & Calm, as they look to exploit this crisis for their benefit with their winner take all mentality, it has been the honor of our professional careers to help ensure independent studios have all the tools they need not just to survive, but thrive, no matter where the future takes us.

And again to our customers who have flooded our inbox with notes of thanks and gratitude, we can’t tell you how much it means to us, and how happy we are to have been able to help you over the past few months.

And don’t worry, we’re not even close to being done!

New Feature: Put Your Calendar in Pandemic Mode and Turn off Guest Access

One of the signature features of Tula Software is the ease with which our system allows your students to make payments and register for class, even when they don’t yet have an account, or even when they’re not logged in. The idea behind this system design has always been to make it easy for students to make payments and register for class, and to reduce as much friction as possible.

It turns out however, that during a global pandemic where the majority of our customers have been ordered to close their doors by local, state and Federal governments, this design can create a sub-optimal experience for students, leading to confusion around why they can’t access the Broadcast Links, which require them to be logged in.

Turn off Guest Access

To address this situation, we’ve added a setting to the “Registration Settings” page that will allow you to turn off guest access.

By default, “guest access” is turned on, and this is how things have always worked, allowing students to register for class without being logged in. Now however, you can turn guest access off, and students will be required to log in, or create an account, before continuing. Now, when someone who is not logged in attempts to register for class, they’ll see the following, depending on whether the event requires payment in order to register.

Modified Registration Links

When payment is required, we’ll display the “Sign up & Pay” link like always. But when the popover is brought up we’ve replaced the “Continue without logging in” link with a “Create account” link. And of course, they can still log in as always. For events that don’t require payment to register, we’ve replaced the “Sign up” link that used to expose the name/email fields allowing people to register, with a “Sign in / Sign up” link that’ll bring up the account login / account creation page.

Since rolling out the Broadcast Links feature, the largest number of support request we have received by far have to do with getting students logged in. For our customers that are operating their business online for now, this update should give you some help getting everyone logged in!

We have NOT changed the system defaults, so if you want to take advantage of this new feature, log into your studio, head on over to the Registration Settings page, and turn off guest access.

To all our customers who have written in with notes of thanks, we appreciate you, and we’re grateful to have you all as part of the Tula Family!

New Feature: Broadcast Your Classes Online and Allow Students to Attend Remotely

As the coronavirus continues to spread, we’ve been thinking hard about how we can support studios that use Tula, so they can continue to support their students and their communities. We’re all going to need a lot of yoga and meditation in the months ahead.

I’m happy to announce today Broadcast Links, an update we’ve made that will help our customers broadcast their classes online using their preferred video platform, while still leveraging the Tula credits system, payments system and registrations system.

With this update, our hope is that our customers will be able to:

• Continue to hold regular classes for customers remotely in the event of local quarantines or business shut-downs.

• Provide a remote option for people who don't want to come to studios, while studios are still open

• Provide enough value that members continue to keep their memberships

• Satisfy obligations for people on annual plans

Add a Broadcast Link to Any Class

On every event page, you’ll now see a “Broadcast” icon (it looks like a bullhorn) next to the others you’re already familiar with. Click that icon to expose the area where you can insert a broadcast link.

Once you’ve added a broadcast url, any student that registers for the class will see the “View Broadcast” link.

Importantly, you can continue to leverage our already built-in functionality that allows you to determine whether payment is required or not in order to register an event. This in effect provides a way for you to put the ‘view broadcast’ links behind a paywall. Of course, you can still allow people to register without paying if you prefer, and simply check them in and take payment virtually when they join.

A few important details

There are a few important details to keep in mind to ensure a quality experience for you and your students.

1. In order for students to see the ‘View Broadcast’ link on the calendar, they must be logged in. So if they register and pay without logging in, they won’t see the link.

2. Because the logic around showing the ‘view broadcast’ link is tied to whether people are registered to the event, we recommend checking students at the end of class. This will ensure that if anyone drops for some reason like a connectivity issue, that they’re able to easily re-join the class.

EDIT 3/23/2020: We now continue to persist the ‘view broadcast’ link once a student has been checked in so you can now check students in, in real time, just like you would at your physical studio.

Choosing a video platform

We recommend using Zoom. They offer a fantastic product at an extremely reasonable rate; it’s easy to use and works great on every platform - whether Android, iOS, PC or Mac.

As studio owners ourselves we know first-hand some of the anxiety our customer are feeling, and we hope this update helps you come up with some creative ways to continue to operating your businesses while expanding the ways in which you’re able to serve your customers.

As always, if you’re a customer of Tula and have any questions, simply email us at help@tulasoftare.com.

Preparing for Strong Customer Authentication

We’ve been putting a lot of time into some updates that will be largely invisible to many of our customers. My very least favorite kind of feature! ;)

You can read all about Strong Customer Authentication on this excellent writeup on Stripe’s website.

In short, it’s a requirement for our European customers, that a secondary authentication is in place for credit card purchases. In the same way you can have two factor authentication for a website with both a login and and a text message code, once SCA is fully implemented/enforced when consumers in the European Union use their credit cards, they’ll have to enter in a secondary form of authentication, except where exemptions apply.

We’ve been working on updating our integration with Stripe, so that our European customer are compliant with the Payment Service Directive (PSD2). Customers that fall within the scope of this directive, and who use our payment forms, will automatically have secondary authentication in place, while transactions that take place within the admin side of the Tula system will be marked appropriately as an exemption.

It’s worth reading the Stripe write-up about all this as there are a variety of payment types that take place on the Tula system that are exempt, such as small payments (~$30), membership payments, and payment from saved cards.

The SCA requirements officially take place on September 14th, 2019 however per Stripe, “the European Banking Authority published new guidance on 21 June 2019, which allows national regulators to postpone the SCA enforcement date for select banks and payment providers.”

While Stripe is expecting a phased in approach to the enforcement of the new requirements, we’re still proceeding with our plan to be ready in the middle of September. We’ll continue to post updates as we make our final updates.

One important note: our iOS app will continue to operate with the current stripe API and therefore won’t have the secondary authentication according to these new directives. Payments within the Admin app are considered exempt, however we won’t be marking them as such against Stripe’s new API. Customers in the European Union may see elevated levels of declined transactions in the iOS app depending on the enforcement rollout.

For your students, we recommend that our European customers begin distributing the student mobile web apps that come with every studio. (yoursubdomain.tulasoftware.com/student) and cease distributing the native iOS app.

While I joked at the beginning of this post about it being largely invisible, the truth is we have a new foundation upon which many more visible features will soon appear.

As always, if you’re a Tula customer and have any questions, get in touch with us through our support channel!

Virtual Audio Attendances: Full Production Release!

I’m thrilled to announce that our latest big new feature is now available to all customers of Tula Software, on all plans! We think this is one of the most important features we’ve ever released, and we wanted to make it equally available to our entire customer base.

If you haven’t had a chance to read our initial announcements about Virtual Audio Attendances, you might want to take a minute to read some of our earlier posts from the Alpha and Beta releases. In short though, you can now upload an audio file to any of your events, and your students can listen to those events from your calendar, and this capability is fully integrated to our login/calendar and member management system.

This feature os intended primarily to help our customers retain existing members, expand their member base, and provide them with vital tools to compete with growing industry trends.

New features for production launch!

There are a couple new features we’re making available with the production launch of Virtual Audio Attendances, mainly a new settings page that allows you to control whether ANY logged in student can listen to the audio files, or whether only students with unlimited passes can listen to the audio, and a new customized widget.

Unlimited Only vs. Everyone Setting

Our primary intention with this feature is to give our customers a way to provide more value to their members with unlimited passes. As Maile used the feature at Tula Yoga Studio though, she realized it would be nice to be able to occasionally open up the feature to everyone, allowing them to experience the virtual classes and have an opportunity to experience this member benefit. So now, while we default to the audio only being available to people with unlimited passes, but now you can change this if you want to for a period of time, and then change it back when you’re ready.

Audio Library Widget

As well, we made a new widget available, to make listening as easy as possible for your students. In addition to the usual widgets, you’ll notice that you now have access to a new tab called “Audio Listing”.

This is essentially a pre-built, custom version of the calendar widget. This widget automatically loads the most recent class that has an audio file attached to it, and defaults to that view in the calendar. And of course, like all our other widgets you can customize the colors to match your studio site. Here’s an example of how Maile’s using at the studio. What I like about this is that it prioritizes recency, allowing students to access the most recent classes as quickly as possible.

Even more releases coming!

Like all the features we built, we’ll be iterating, enhancing and updating this feature based on what we hear from our customers, what our customers hear from their students, and how we see people using this new functionality.

We’re thrilled with how version 1.0 of Virtual Audio Attendances has come together and we hope all our customers find as much benefit from it as maile has at her studio.

Very lastly, if you plan to deploy Virtual Audio Attendances at your studio, you might want to check out some of our earlier posts about it as well:

• Introducing Virtual Audio Attendances

• Virtual Audio Attendances Moving from Alpha to Beta

• Initial Lessons Learned Deploying Virtual Audio Attendances