The labor shortage can be tricky, but utilizing technology can remedy the impact.

Allow your employees to provide the best experiences possible for your patrons. In this newsletter, you will learn about upcoming education and training opportunities, updated and active releases, and how you can adopt technology for your employees and patrons.

One thing has impacted parks and recreation departments everywhere: the labor shortage.

It’s a problem that’s not going away, but also one that can be remedied by technology in many instances. Take memberships and visit check-ins at your sites for example. Technology can be used in a variety of ways, from Kiosks to mobile devices to ensure you capture valid, accurate data, while freeing up resources to perform other tasks. But are these technologies being adopted?

Vermont Systems Education programs offer the most efficient way to become proficient and productive with the software as well as the fastest way to onboard new employees, with options to fit any time and budget. If one of your goals is productivity – learning from and with others is a proven path.

• • • Every other Thursday at 2:00pm Eastern, RecChat offers conversations about new features, hot topics, and upcoming events. Sign up for the latest and to view archived sessions. Sign up here.
    • The RecTrac Lab: Our online series of micro-learning courses covers topics for everyone from new to advanced users. Contact us to find the right RecTrac Lab courses for you.

This past week we hosted our 2022 Vermont Systems Symposium. There was a lot of learning and much fun happening in our neck of the woods up in Vermont. We loved seeing you all in person!

Unable to attend the Symposium this year? Start planning for 2023 by adding it to your budget. We would love to see you!

to your budget.

In the recent months we have seen an unprecedented demand for recreation programming and summer camps. With the demand for programming often outpacing the supply available, registrations have become more eventful than ever. For larger customers with particularly high-volume events this demand has also stressed the WebTrac application. As a rapid response, Vermont Systems has introduced the WebTrac Virtual Waiting Room for VS Cloud (Hosted) customers.

The virtual waiting room allows Vermont Systems to meter traffic destined for your WebTrac site at the onset of registration launches. This allows us to pull all patrons into a randomly assigned queue just prior to the start of the registration and then release them to your WebTrac site in a manner that promotes a positive and predictable customer experience.  We have successfully deployed the virtual waiting room for many recent high-volume registrations and are now positioned to use this as a tool if we determine the demand may exceed the ability of your WebTrac site to sustain a positive user experience.

For events that are known to Vermont Systems, we can monitor traffic leading up to the event and determine if the virtual waiting room will be needed to support the demand.  Please continue to inform our Support or Hosted Services teams of high-volume upcoming registrations.

RecTrac 3.1.10.14.00 is ready for download: We’re happy to announce that RecTrac Version 3.1.10.14.00 has been released!  There are many important  updates in this release.   We urge all departments to update as soon as possible.

Make sure to update to the latest version of RecTrac and patch files to ensure have all the latest updates and enhancements. With our latest hiring in early August, we are back to full staffing levels and are able to assist and respond to cases quicker and more effectively than in recent months.

The online Live Chat continues to be the best and most popular method for customers to get a quick answer on software items. You can access chat in the Support Portal online: Home · Customer Self-Service (vermontsystems.com)   We look forward to working with you!

Implementation Team: The Municipal Implementation team continues to engage customers with  remote training, 10.3 to 3.1 migrations, and new customer onboarding and training.  Summer is a great time to work with this team on any outstanding projects as the team calendar usually has openings available each week.  2022 is the final push for customers to move from the retired 10.3 product to 3.1. Please reach out to the team if you need any additional training or have not yet scheduled your 10.3 to 3.1 migration. You can email the Sales team for quotes on training Sales@vermontsystems.com or email Brian Hatch (Implementation Manager) BrianH@vermontsystems.com with specific training questions or to set up migration discovery calls.

Education Team: The Education team (EDU) led by Zach Malloch continues working on self-help content for our users.  The EDU team has selected a new platform to publish the application Knowledge Base, Videos and Topic Docs.  Content from the current systems is being moved over to the new platform in July and we plan to launch in August of 2022.  This platform will provide you and our Support team the content you need in one portal with improved search capabilities significantly improving your support experience.  Don’t forget to check out the bi-weekly free RecChats with Zach and team on software and industry topics.   Look for the invite via the VS Connect email.

Reminders: We do encourage all customers and IT departments to keep the RecTrac version up to date to ensure you have all the latest updates and features. On-premises customers should plan to update 5 times per year. Fully hosted customers are all set and get each update loaded automatically.

Support Portal and Knowledge Base: Access the support portal to chat with an expert, access education documents, and find FAQs. Be on the lookout for the new knowledge platform mentioned above and look forward to an improved experience in the knowledge base.

VS Assist: Our team of RecTrac experts can ensure that you hit the ground running with a database and solution that’s move-in ready. Whatever your needs, VS Assist will help you reduce training requirements, accelerate your implementation timeline, and enable you to start better serving your patrons and community faster.

It’s hard not to miss the trend: the vast majority of organizations are moving to cloud-hosted solutions. The reasons are clear, Cloud Hosting simply delivers far more advantages and allows your team to focus on serving your community. But is it right for you?

Take a look around your organization and see how you would answer the questions.