What's New in Business Appointment Manager 2010
We've listened to you, our customers, and added many new features that you really
want and need. Business Appointment Manager 2010 now sports a new look, with familiar
Microsoft Office® look and feel, and it gives you more power, more control and more
flexibility. What's more, we make it easy for you to upgrade. Business Appointment
Manager 2010 easily upgrade your existing datbase in a flash. For a complete list
of features added,
click here.
New look with familiar user interface
If you have learned to use any of the Microsoft Office 2007/2010 programs, you can
use the same skills to navigate around Business Appointment Manager. If you are
new to Office, you will find that Business Appointment Manager's friendly user interface
makes it easy to discover commands and features that otherwise might have been hidden
beneath layers of toolbars and menus. The screen layout is designed to help you
quickly find the commands you need to complete a task and reflect the way you do
appointment scheduling. Contextual tabs bring context sensitive and relevant command
options to your attention precisely when they are needed. Effortlessly drag and
drop appointments from one day to another or move them weeks or months instantly.
More ways to schedule
Need to change the time, date or your service provider for an appointment? Simple
– just use the drag and drop feature. Want to book multiple services or combine
services and products together? Easy – put them all in an appointment template.
Need to reserve rooms, tools, equipment or anything else you must have when making
an appointment? No problem – just add them and BAM will flag any conflict.
The new Schedule Wizard speeds up scheduling of commonly used services and complex appointments
that depend on a number of variables such as the availability of certain providers
and resources, the availability of any provider with the required skills, etc. To
schedule new appointments, you simply specify the desired time window and the appointment
templates to use. The wizard automatically seeks and displays all open time slots
that match the criteria specified in the templates and your operational settings.
Save time emailing appoinment schedules and reminders
The E-mail Appointment Schedules wizard guides you through the process of sending
appointment schedules to all or selected providers. Each e-mail can contain each
provider's individual appointments or appointments for a group of selected providers.
You have the option to include an ICalendar formatted file that contains the provider's
personal schedule for easy importing of appointment schedules into calendar programs
or PDAs.
You can also right click on an appointment to send a reminder email composed using
a template that you can modify to suit your needs.
Access from anywhere!
Designed for multiple schedulers working concurrently and accessing the same information
from anywhere, Business Appointment Manager gives you the flexibility to store your
data on-premise or in a Web-hosted SQL Server database, or in the cloud using a
secure cloud-based relational database service like Microsoft SQL Azure™. When you
use a Web-hosted SQL Server database or Microsoft Azure, multiple users across geographical
areas can work from the same data and instantly update the data using a standard
Internet connection. Business Appointment Manager is optimized to use minimal bandwidth
and to tolerate communications failures so a typical DSL connection is more than
sufficient for most cases.
Roll your own plug-ins with BAM Software Development Kit (SDK)
Plug-ins provides endless possibilities for programmers and system integrators to
create customized business processes that extend Business Appointment Manager’s
functions. Plug-ins can be written in a .NET language such as VB .NET or C# and
compiled as .NET assembly dynamic link libraries (DLL) that can be run from Business
Appointment Manager. At startup, Business Appointment Manager will search its directory
for plug-in DLLs and display them under the Plug-ins drop-down menu.
The SDK provides programmers with a powerful toolset for writing software to integrate
with Business Appointment Manager. It is a .NET class library that allows programmers
to write fully functional stand-alone programs or plug-ins that have full access
to Business Appointment Manager data objects.
Report engine overhaul and a new report
The report viewer now sports the new Office 2007 look and allows up to five sort
levels - up from three. You can now import and run custom reports developed by us
for your specialized requirements. By popular request, the new Appointments by Customer
report has been added to show appointments by customer for a specified date range.
You have the options of enabling/disabling the display of appointment notes and
appointment items for each appointment listed.
For a complete list of features added,
click here.