AtHomeNet Blog 360

Struggling to Collect Association Dues in a timely manner? Consider giving residents an easy online payment option http://ping.fm/lTBLb

Over the past 11 years we have built up a stable of some 50+ features on our homeowners association website service and every month we release even more new enhancements and features to our existing clients.  However, with all of that functionality it can be difficult to know if your community is taking advantage of all of the tools that are available to it.  So last month we created the “Account Feature Review” on the Administrator’s Statistics Menu.  This quick checklist shows you if there are any features that you are not currently making use of.  If you see any red dots on this screen you can contact our support department to find out more information about what you are missing and, if you like what you hear, we can quickly add it to your menu for you. 

With so many features available and new ones being added all the time, there is bound to be something your community site is missing so take a minute and check out the “Account Feature Review” on your Homeowners Association or Condo Association AtHomenet web site.

We rolled out some great new enhancements to the AtHomeNet Classic community website service this month so I decided to put together the following “TOP 5 Cool New Things” list:

1. PayForms – you can now quickly and easily accept credit card payments from inside your custom eForms.  Use this to sell tickets to social events, accept club or team registration fees, room rental fees, or, if you are an association management company that handles rentals, you can take rental applications online with the application fee.  No setup fees, no monthly fees.  Nice and Easy!  Give us a call to get started.
2. RSS Calendar – An RSS feed of your public events calendar.  Now, management companies, CAI Chapters, or any other AtHomeNet client who has a public events calendar can let anyone “subscribe” to it using their favorite Feed Reader software or website like Google Reader, FeedDemon or NewsGator (use another one?  post it in the comments).  Your upcoming events will go out to them automatically to give you additional exposure for your organization’s activities.
3. My Documents – Now your site administrator can add documents that are specific to a given household or member to a private area that only they (and you) can access.  This is a great way to store historical architectural change requests or warranty documents and appliance manuals for new homes.  Residents can find their documents on the new “My Documents” tab on their “My Profile” page.
4. Custom eMail Bulletin Templates – you can now create your very own custom eMail Bulletin templates and save them for easy use again and again in the future.  Or, even easier, customize one our our 50+ beautiful pre-designed templates and save that as your own template for later use.
5. Speaking of eMail Bulletins, we have added 7 great new designs covering Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s day and even a reminder to set your clocks forward in the Spring, as well as 2 all new “Newsletter” style templates that will come in very handy when you have a few different notices to get out to your residents and want it to look nice.  I don’t mean to cheat by throwing a 6th one in here but we also made it easier for your residents to subscribe to eMail Bulletins (see, it’s related) by using the new “Subscriptions” tab right from within their “My Profile” page.

I hope you take a few minutes to check these new features out and, as always, give us your thoughts and suggestions on how we can make your community website better.

If you want some more details we posted a quick video (okay, it’s 15 minutes, but it covers a LOT) highlighting all the new stuff we released this month in our Video Library. Check under “What’s New in AtHomeNet Classic – January 2009″.  While you’re there we have videos for each of the monthly releases for the past 4 months so take some time and catch up on your AtHomeNet TV.