Important Changes in COv5 update 1071

This post is to let you know about a couple of the changes coming in update 1071.

Appointment Recurrence

The Recurring Appointment facility has been removed as of build 1071 and replaced with the ability to Block Copy appointments instead (see further down for more info on Block Copying).

Why? Well it’s principally for technical reasons. Here’s a detailed explanation which you can skip past if you’re not interested…
@Detailed Explanation wrote:

Although a ‘recurring appointment’ may appear many times in a diary, it is in fact only ONE record in the database, which is displayed on multiple dates. It was implemented this way to maintain consistency with Microsoft Outlook so that customers could synchronize ClinicOffice with their Outlook diary. The problem with this kind of recurrence is that it doesn’t lend itself to ClinicOffice. Users were often trying to use a recurring appointment (e.g. ‘recur every 1 month for 3 times’) to book a ‘treatment plan’. This didn’t work because it’s only ONE appointment and a single appointment can’t have multiple session notes allocated to it. This made it all a bit counter-intuitive.

We’ve now introduced Google Calendar Synchronization. Google also offer appointment ‘recurrency’ but it implements it differently to Outlook which made life even more difficult. Hence in order to be able to synchronize with both Outlook and Google Calendar, we decided to drop support for ‘recurring’ appointments.

Q. What will happen to my recurring appointments?
They will be converted to normal appointments. The only thing to note is that recurring appointments with NO END DATE (i.e. they recur infinitely) are capped at 2 years. Obviously it’s not possible to create an infinite number of appointment records stretching on to all eternity!

Q. What about recurring appointments in my Outlook or Google Calendar – how will they sync?
They won’t. ClinicOffice will simply ignore recurring appointments from now on. You can still keep recurring appointments in your Outlook/Google Calendar but they won’t be imported into ClinicOffice.

For more information about the new Google Calendar Sync feature, please see this short video :-
[link coming soon]

Block Copying Appointments

The “Block Copy” facility replaces the previous ‘recur appointment’ feature. Please take a look at this tutorial video for more information :-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_DWIkObt7A

NEW Diary Timeline Feature

This is a great new feature introduced into ClinicOffice v5. If you’re using version 4, please click this link for information on upgrading :-

Here’s an introductory video of the Diary Timeline in action :-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QEAMYN3X6s