What are the minimum system requirements for end consituents accessing our site?

Micki Harlow

Convio Product vs Customizations

The baseline Convio product and all the parts of the web pages it produces are engineered to be compatible with the widest possible range of browsers and other constituent agents. However, the product is designed to allow a large degree of customization of the constituent interface presented to visitors to your site. At the option of an individual organization, any client side active technology, such as animated images, Macromedia Flash, Java applets and ActiveX can be used with the Convio product - if you have chosen to use these technologies on your site, which are not supported by all constituents' browsers and systems, their use may reduce the proportion of internet constituents who can successfully use your site. Convio's Services and Support staff will always advise you on trade-offs like this when asked to introduce such client side technology, to allow you to make an informed decision on whether or not to use such client side technologies.

Content Standards

All of the Convio product constituent elements are designed to the XHTML 1.0 standard, and also to be downwardly compatible with HTML 4.01 and HTML 3.2, and to accommodate quirks and deviations from those standards in browsers which are in common use. The Convio product constituent interface uses only elements from these standards, and does not rely on client side automation such as JavaScript in order to operate correctly.

Supported Browsers

As a result of the above, the Convio product is compatible with almost all browsers in current use. Part of Convio's product testing includes exercising the product constituent interface with a wide range of browser software, including Microsoft Internet Explorer (Win32 and MacOS), Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, and Opera, and on each of the three major groups of OS platform: Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, and Unix. **

Officially supported browsers for the product constituent interface include:

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, version 4.0 and higher

Microsoft Internet Explorer for MacOS, version 5.0

Mozilla 1.0 (3 platforms)

Netscape Navigator 4.7 (3 platforms)

Netscape 6.2 (3 platforms)

Opera 5.0 and higher (3 platforms)

The representative operating systems used for the 3 platforms when testing are: Windows 98 and 2000 (for Win32), MacOS 9.0 (for MacOS), and Linux 2.2 and 2.4 (for Unix).

Accessibility

From release 3.5 onwards, the Convio software formally supports the creation of websites to meet accessibility standards to facilitate use of the sites by people who require assistive technologies such as special constituent agents (web browsers), special input devices or specially configured displays.

The two principal features of accessibility are:

All constituent interface pages powered by the baseline product are compliant with the accessibility standards, provided that site-wide customizations such as the page wrapper are also kept in compliance.

Tools are available within the Convio Content products to assist Convio administrators in adhering to these standards in web content which they create.

The standards with which the product complies are:

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, P1 and P2 (to "Double A" standard)

US Federal Law Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508

Multimedia and Client-Side Technologies

"Client side technology" refers to any system which requires interpretation of data or execution of code on the constituent's computer. Often this will require a browser "plug-in" or other additional software on the client side which either (a) may be turned off by some constituents, or (b) may not ship with all client systems. Examples of this are JavaScript, ActiveX, Java applets, .NET applets, Realplayer clips and Macromedia Flash.

The Convio baseline product UI does not require any of these technologies to be available in order to operate properly. There are, however, some minor usability enhancements which come into effect when JavaScript is enabled.

Customers may at their discretion wish to use additional client side technology in their individual sites to enhance the visual appeal, however this will reduce the range of constituents who can access their sites.

Browser Cookies

There are three cookies used by the Convio system:

The "Remember Me" mechanism stores a permanent cookie containing an informationless token, which is used to identify returning registered constituents of the site. This token is matched against the database. This function is inoperable if cookies are disabled.

The email delivery mechanism uses stored cookies to identify unique email clients who open or click through from a mass email (Communication, Action Alert, etc.). If cookies are disabled, or the email client uses an HTML engine that does not support cookies (e.g. Eudora) this feature will not work; this introduces a small error into the statistics reported to the Convio administrator.

The Java application server on which the Convio software runs will push a temporary cookie in order to track a constituent's session from page to page. If cookies are disabled, session tracking continues to operate - the system will fall back to encoding the session information in URLs. This mode may result in loss of the session context if the constituent navigates away from the Convio site.

Footnote on Internet Explorer Versions

• • although they share a common product name for marketing purposes, and are both produced by Microsoft, Internet Explorer for Windows and Internet Explorer for MacOS are in fact two very different browsers; in particular, they do not share the same HTML interpreter and thus are liable to behave differently when faced with certain HTML constructs. There was also a third version of Internet Explorer, released for some versions of Unix such as Solaris and HP-UX.

linton.myers

Is there a newer version of the system requirements document somewhere? According to the above, "The representative operating systems used for the 3 platforms when testing are: Windows 98 and 2000 (for Win32), MacOS 9.0 (for MacOS), and Linux 2.2 and 2.4 (for Unix)." That would mean that Convio has not been tested for Windows XP or Vista or Mac OS 10.x, which can't be correct.

Nathan Walther

I've posted the browsers and assistive technology we currently test with here:  http://community.customer.convio.com/message/5463