Saturday, September 25, 2010

New features added to Premium Plan


If you are on the Premium Plan, you can now mark appointments confirmed, completed or no-show, all without having to bring up the edit window.  Previously, you have to bring up the edit window, click the drop-down list, select a new status, and then save.  Good exercise for hand-eye co-ordination, but not very convenient.

How does this new feature help manage my appointments you ask?  We have added summary counts of the different appointment status to the bottom of the Appointment History Report.  The payoff of is now you can get a weekly (or monthly) reading of how many people showed up (good clients), how many cancelled (at least they let you know ahead of time), and how many were no-shows (naughty clients).

Useful?  Check it out and tell us.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

We have made improvements to the Mobile Edition based on your feedback.  Not new, but definitely improved.

If you have registered just one business with one calendar, the Mobile Edition (m.lattiss.com) will now start in the appointments page.  No more navigating from businesses to calendars to appointments.  You save just two taps, but remarkably, it makes quite a difference.  Of course, if you have more than one staff calendar, you will start in the calendars page (we’re having problems with the mind-reading module and is therefore unable to tell whose appointments you want to look at).

One of our clients wanted to be able to create unavailable time from the Mobile Edition.  Sounds like a good idea.  After much fiddling around under the hood, here it is. Say you’re having lunch and suddenly remembered you need to collect your dry cleaning that afternoon. Just get out your handy iPhone or Android phone and proceed like you’re making an appointment.  Just select “Unavailable Time” as the service (first item in the drop-down).  No need to go back to the office to use the computer.

An observant fellow pointed out that in the appointments list, we truncate long lines at word boundaries and this sometimes led to rather mysterious behaviour.  The client’s name will sometimes appear and sometimes not.  Indeed.  So, we changed it to cut-off on a letter boundary and added an ellipsis (…) as a clue that the line was cut off.  Or… you can try turning your phone sideways.

We also made some improvements in the regular, non-mobile, edition.  A client told us he prints the “daily print view” every morning so he knows who’s coming in that day and can call them if they have forgotten.  We send email reminders, but I suppose some people need more reminding.  Well, the daily print view included cancelled appointments, but did not indicate the appointment was cancelled.  Oops!  In this update, cancelled appointments no longer shows up in the daily print view.  Hmmm… we should probably include contact information as well, huh?  Oh well, next time.

Some of you may be wondering what is the daily print view?  Go to your calendar, and select the Day tab.  A link will appear on the left, labelled “Printable Version”.  Oh, that view is only available on business calendars.

We got a call a few days ago from a client with a problem.  She uses Lattiss to schedule interviews, and found that increasing the “max concurrent clients” settings from 4 to 6 did not open up slots that already had 4 appointments.  Hmmm…  We looked into it, and found a flaw in our software.  Awkward.  Putting on corporate weasel hat, “only a small number of customers were affected.”  Actually, it’s the first time somebody ran into this, but still… So, we fired up the Java pot, and a couple of days and several gallons later, it’s fixed.  Yay!

Most of the improvements are the result of you telling us what you find awkward and how you want to use Lattiss.  Please keep the feedback (ok, brickbats too if you must) coming.  Now, if we can only get the mind-reading module to work…

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Site will be offline this Friday morning for upgrades

The site will be offline for up to 30 minutes this Friday morning (10 September) starting at around 03:00 am Eastern Time.  We are upgrading our hosting plan, which means more memory and other resources.  This should translate to slightly better performance and more headroom for growth.

Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.  We try to do this at a time where not many people are active, but since we have clients around the world, some people may be up and about at that time.