@ChristianS9906 That takes care of one part. The UI is always a large part of any project. We also have to notify account admins when sync changes have been made so that they can review the changes. Other side effects that I haven't predicted have to be considered as well.

@jonah-soundhound-com A simpler way to do it would be to just generate a bunch of annual docket entries for the entire lifetime of the patent all at once, just like some systems generate a docket entry for each extension of time that's possible for a response when an office action arrives.

But I hate seeing all of those future entries and having to clear them if they're not needed, so I prefer a more complicated configuration that only generates each docket entry when it's needed. A little careful work up front pays off over time.

@RichardS3059 I second IP Manager (ugh). I too managed a medium sized law firm docketing group and while the updates were nice, the firm's portfolio was made up of a mixture of foreign and US. As you said, the effort to keep those rules current if quite a commitment. One thing we appreciate about AppColl is the affordability. I think by not having foreign rules certainly helps with keeping costs low.

@BrandonK6644 said in .docx Form Letter templates:

I'd also love to be able to automatically generate a template within a task when the task is generated. Is that possible?

+1 for this request - automatically adding documents to tasks would be a great time saver.

@AnnM9156 thanks for your input. We use an arbitrary attorney reference number format which does not include a country code.

The transient task solution wouldn't really do much--just email the recipients once when the note is updated. Fast forward a month later, and nobody will remember that they received that email, and might miss whatever is important.

Your pop-up slap-to-the-face approach would be much more effective at getting a user's attention.

@mike_appcoll Thank you for doing Learning Series tutorials on often overlooked features. But please also always consider why often overlooked features are often overlooked. Perhaps some eventual user interface tweaks will result in fewer features being often overlooked.

The priority of this request has been elevated. We will let you know when this has been implemented.

Thank you for the suggestion. We should be able to remove the prefix from the sort. However, sorting by last name would affect all customers who have come to expect it with first name first.

@MarkW5689 The new form field explorer control should help with most form field questions. It is available on the same pane as the history and discussion tabs.

@AppCollS2261 That's great--I would, however, make sure that:

a) The update only happens to tasks that have the same role as the task owner (for example, if you change the attorney for several matters, you'd only want to update the tasks for those matters that had the previous attorney as the owner--you wouldn't want to make the new attorney, for example, the owner of tasks owned by the paralegals for the matter).

b) The update only happens to "open" tasks--the "owner" of closed tasks is a historical record of which person handled that closed task. It shouldn't be changed (or, at the least, make it an option that you have to opt into in order to bulk-update the owner of closed-out tasks).

Looking forward to this.

Best,
Christian

Hi George and Sadiq,

Thank you for these suggestions. We have added this to our engineering list.

@support_appcoll Pretty good solution!

I think that I once saw somebody, elsewhere, suggest that it would be nice to have a bulk task closure feature available within the Matters view. Maybe I just imagined that, myself.

I like the idea, though I can picture the GUI starting to get crowded with quite a few buttons.

Perhaps one approach to providing that feature while minimizing clutter would be to have tick boxes in a narrow leftmost column in the list of tasks and have a section of buttons on the left related to manipulating tasks, but have those task manipulation buttons become visible only when one or more boxes is ticked and become invisible as soon as no box is ticked for any shown task.

@MarkW5689 IMO this solution has the same problem, which is the need for manual changes to what should be a pretty simple and easy field to be provided to us. For email addresses, your solution works great and I appreciate the info.

@SadiqA2304 I'm used to programming, so the idea of adding syntax for more control of the templates feels better to me than adding fields that have logic embedded into them. I agree that putting the first name into the nickname field if no nickname exists isn't a great solution, but it does work until they provide something better. You only have to embed the nickname field into your template to get the desired result. It's a little extra setup work to remember to fill in the nickname field when it's not really a nickname, but that's a one-time effort when you create the contact.

I'll always prefer a programmatic way to accomplish the result over fields that have field-specific logic embedded into them, because they allow a more generalized result. For example, none of the several priority fields produces exactly how I often
want priority information specified. As it is, the list of fields doesn't remind me how each version is formatted, so I have to do tests to figure out which one has the closest to what I need, then manually edit the result of the template every time it's used.

If we had a generalized formatting syntax, we wouldn't have to wait for AppColl to create yet another special-purpose field, but would immediately have the ability to get what we want.

@RichardS3059 I like the idea - but I'm not optimistic that Appcoll will add new syntax when it would be easier for them to add a new field. On the user side of things, learning syntax is a similar amount of effort as looking up/remembering field names is similar effort, if not more effort imo.

@ChristianS9906 We have a bunch of items in production and rollout will be soon. Many new features on the way.

I created a report of all my matters. I sorted it by Application Number then by Examiner Name so that Examiner Name is that main sorting criteria. For any given examiner name, the application numbers were in order. I saved it as a new test report. I opened some other report and then opened my test report. The matters were sorted by examiner name, but for any given examiner name, the application numbers were in no predictable order.

If there is an existing way to save a report with a multi-level sort as Kim requests, I would love to know.

@BerndN5890

Can we ask how you arrived at that URL via navigating Patent Center?