Posts made by ChristianS9906

It would be nice if there was a way to easily pull or display more detailed info on all matter inventors from the Matter Details interface. For example, right now, it just shows you the name of each inventor. However, it would be really great if the interface could be updated to show (or optionally show) further info for each inventor, e.g., City/State/Country of residence, citizenship, assignee, and possibly other data (for example, a field that might show if they are ex-employees or active employees).

Most/all of the above info is actually very useful info to have on-hand when looking at a matter. For example, if any inventor is a resident of India, you would want to be able to easily figure that out so you can make sure to docket requesting an Indian foreign filing license. Similarly, if any inventor is a Greek citizen, you'd want to be able to easily detect that as well so you can make sure you file the first application in Greece. And if there are inventors that work for different entities/would assign to different entities, you'd want to know that up-front as well so that the proper assignments get generated.

Right now, the only ways to get all this info for the inventors in a matter are to:

a) Drill down inventor-by-inventor from the Matter Details screen. You have to click on each inventor's "View Contact" button, review the pop-up, and then close it. This technique does not let you see all of this info at once for all of the inventors. It also does not show all info for each inventor (although, to be fair, it does show most/all of the info I flagged above).

b) Create a form letter or email that has fields to show all this data, and then generate it. This is clunky/cumbersome.

c) Create a database query in Contacts module? I'm not even sure if you can do this. But even if you can, it would require leaving the Matter Details module for the Contacts module and then crafting a query. It should not require such steps to get easy access to this info.

I would propose that the Matter Details interface be updated to include a button below the "Add" button called "Summary" that, when clicked, would bring up a pop-up window that listed, in table form, all of the inventors, their as-filed names (if applicable), their citizenship, assignee/employer, city of residence, etc. Ideally, the listed data can be copied in table form and pasted in table form into other documents, e.g., Excel, Word, or Outlook. It would, in effect, act somewhat like the "View Contact" link, but for all inventors at once and showing the data in a table format.

And if you really wanted to gold-plate it, you could add the ability for any individual user to add/remove any column from the Contacts module to the table view and to change the column order as they see fit, similar to how users can modify the columns in the Contacts module itself. That would let users potentially add other fields to the display that might be relevant to them, e.g., a field like "Tags" that they maybe use to store indications of whether or not the inventor is an ex-employee or not, or perhaps "Private Notes" or "Nicknames" to provide more info on how to communicate with that inventor.

@ChristianS9906 After posting this, I noticed that task types now include a "deleted" task status that can be selected for the auto-close behavior. I initially thought that maybe AppColl would cause tasks with such status to automatically delete themselves when they auto-close (which would pretty much reach a similar end result to the above). But then I tested it, and it seems like all it does is close the task out as "deleted." The task sticks around, however.

AppColl includes a "Transient Event" DeadlineType that was created responsive to input I provided several years ago. A transient event is just like a normal event except that it comes into existence and then immediately deletes itself--however, it triggers any follow-on tasks that might be needed and sends out notifications associated with it prior to disappearing.

It would be very nice if the Tasks framework were to be updated so that any TaskType could be made to be "transient," i.e., made to self-delete once no longer "Open." For example, every TaskType definition could have a "Transient" (or "Delete Once Closed" if a more descriptive name is desired) setting, e.g., a checkbox, that can be checked for a TaskType if that TaskType is to self-destruct once closed out.

This would be a little different than how the existing Transient Event DeadlineType works in that non-Event TaskTypes with this setting enabled would not immediately self-delete, but would stay visible on the docket until closed out. However, the existing Transient Event DeadlineType should be implementable under this new framework as well, e.g., as a normal Event DeadlineType that has the "Transient" setting enabled--since Events are tasks that instantly complete themselves, the "transient"-enabled Event should work like the current Transient Event DeadlineType.

The benefit to having this setting is that it would allow for intermediate deadlines, e.g., reminder deadlines, to be auto-closed and then disappear from the docket, as opposed to cluttering it up in a "completed" state. We like to have our docket be relatively streamlined, e.g., free of low-value entries. An advance reminder of an upcoming foreign deadline, for example, is useful to have on the docket, but once that reminder is in the past, it really isn't something we need to keep seeing.... Being able to have it automatically clean itself off the docket would be a nice capability to have (and would save our docketing department time and effort).

@SadiqA2304 Sort of...but this requires a) two browser windows running at the same time (more windows!) and b) still requires the user to have to navigate to each matter in each interface.

AppColl allows you to have logins to multiple AppColl accounts, allowing a law firm user to access the law firm's AppColl account and also client AppColl accounts (if given login rights). It's a neat feature.

Right now, to switch accounts you have to go to the account icon in the upper right corner, hover over it, hover over the Switch Accounts menu flyout, and then select the account you want to switch to. You then need to navigate to the matter you want to view in the switched-to account.

In many cases, a user will actually be wanting to switch between accounts to look at the same matter. For example, there may be tasks that need to be completed in two separate accounts for the same matter. It would be a really neat feature if AppColl could, for users having login rights to multiple accounts, identify those matters that exist in two different accounts and then, in the Matter Details view, provide a button that, when clicked, switches between the record for that matter in one AppColl account to the record for that same matter in the other AppColl account. This would let the user flip back and forth between two accounts while still viewing the same matter. This saves the user the hassle of navigating back to that matter in either account after an account switch (and avoids the need to use the Account Switch flyout menu.

Just curious if this feature/fix is in the works. The inability for users to edit/delete their own discussion posts hobbles the Discussion feature significantly. For example, we would like our staff to be able to just put all their comments into a single discussion entry (to avoid lengthy chains of entries), but they can only do that for Task Discussions (not Matter or, presumably, Contacts Discussions). They also cannot delete a Discussion comment they made, which would be desirable from a docket cleanup perspective.

Can you please let me know if this is something that will be addressed soon?

Thank you.

The ability to see how frequently a given report has been viewed is a nice feature add; thanks for including it. However, I have some suggestions for making it more useful:

a) The look-back window is only 90 days; it would be nice if it also looked back 180 days and 365 days. Some reports might get accessed only on a quarterly basis, and the 90-day lookback might miss that.

b) The usage stats only seem to include "views"--it would be nice if it also included other types of report access. For example, a report that is synced every night or emailed/FTP'd every night might never be "viewed" after it is created, but it is nonetheless in heavy use.

c) It would be great if a report could be made that listed all reports and the various usage stats that are currently only viewable report-by-report by hovering over each report. If we want to do a report "cull," step one would be to try and get a sense for which reports are rarely used. Right now, we'd have to hover over every report to get that info, which is not at all efficient.

Please do keep the improvements coming!

Thanks,
Christian

Each Task Type definition has a "Description" field that can be used to store internal notes regarding that Task Type. As far as I can tell, this field is only visible in the Task Types module and in the Task Type editor. It would be very useful if that field could also be accessible as a field in emails/form letters/reports (just like DeadlineType is available).

For example, it would be helpful to be able to store instructions for how to handle a particular task type/deadline in the task type definition and then display that information to users in association with each instance of that task type. This would be particularly helpful for more esoteric deadlines that people may not be as familiar with.

Ideally, there would actually be a separate "Instructions" field for each Task Type that could be used for this purpose (allowing "Description" to be used to describe what the task is, what purpose it serves, etc., while "Instructions" is used to store instructions to the task owner of what they need to do), but this would be icing on the cake. You might even consider having two separate Instructions fields, one for short instructions and one for more detailed ones.

Thus, two suggestions:

a) Make the Task Type "Description" field accessible via emails/form letters/reports, and

b) Add an "Instructions" text field (similar to "Description") to Task Types (or "Instructions1" and "Instructions2" fields) and have them be similarly ssible via emails/form letters/reports.

Hopefully at least (a) can be done relatively quickly.

It would be nice to be able to filter records by the Discussion field; can this feature be added?

@mike_appcoll Just curious--any ETA on item (c) above?

The Contact merge interface does not show first/middle/last names as separate columns. When you have multiple contacts that only differ in that one of their names is actually a double name, e.g., John David as first name instead of John as first name and David as middle name, the two contacts appear identical in the Merge interface, so you don't know which one you are picking as the primary contact....

Can this be fixed?

AppColl allows you to create form-filled USPTO forms for a matter; you can also create form-filled copies of such forms for multiple matters relatively easily from the Matters module. It would, however, be great if one could (for at least certain forms), give the user the option to specify how fields in that form that are NOT fillable from AppColl data are to be filled in.

For example, the AIA/122, AIA/123, AIA/83, and SB/123 forms (and there may be others) all relate to changing the address for a patent or application. Take the AIA/123 form, which is used to switch the correspondence/maintenance fee notice address--you need to provide either (a) a customer number that has the new address or (b) separately specify the name/address/telephone/email of the new addressee. It would be really great if AppColl gave you the chance to enter data for the fields in (b) prior to generating the PDFs, and then populated those fields in the generated PDF with that data.

For example, we recently had to transfer files back to a client (with no successor counsel arranged) and file change of correspondence address forms for 30 different patents. All of them had the information in (b) specified to be the same, and we had to copy-paste that info (which involved copying the data for 8 fields into all 30 forms--240 copy-pastes!) to finish the forms. It would have been a huge time-saver if we could have supplied that info up-front and had AppColl populate it when it populated the matter-specific data.

It would be a pretty nice feature to be able to assign permissions to groups and assign users to those groups; the idea would be that each user would be a member of one or more groups and would have the permissions associated with each group.

Moreover, it would be nice to have the ability to specify, for each group, what data they are allowed to edit, especially with respect to TaskTypes. For example, we have a fairly strict policy as to who has "add/modify/delete" permissions in our system--we do this to limit the potential for errors. However, there are some tasks that are of lower importance--we'd like to be able to delegate the ability to modify those tasks to people that do not otherwise have global "add/modify/delete" permission.

This would let us docket/dedocket those tasks without taking up the resources of our docketing department while still protecting the integrity of our overall docketing system.

Probably not an easy thing to implement, but it would be very useful.

Cheers,
Christian

@SadiqA2304 I thought of that but was concerned that it might muck with triggering conditions if the task name was later changed to remove the "under development" text.

It would also mean that normal users would still see it and the under development tasks would still clutter up the interface.

It would be helpful if Task Types had a setting allowing them to be specified as being "under development." Under-development tasks would only be visible to Admins in the GUI and reports and invisible to all other users. This would prevent such task types from inadvertently being used by users before they are finalized, potentially resulting in mis-docketed tasks.

Once under-development task types are finalized and tested, the "under development" setting could be removed and the task types made available for general use.

AppColl has a "Trash" that deleted items get sent to; items in the Trash can be selectively undeleted if desired. The trash can also be emptied to permanently delete items.

However, there are some aspects of trash that could be vastly improved:

a) For the love of God, make deleting trash items a background task. Right now, if you delete items, you can expect to wait ~3+ minutes/1000 items, and the poor schmuck doing it can't really do anything else in AppColl while the deleting is occurring.

b) The trash should be able to be filtered. For example, I'd like to be able to delete all items in the trash that are more than a month old, but the only way to do that is to go through every page of trash items more than a month old, select all items, and then delete them. At 120 pages of trash items, I'm looking at a minimum of six hours spent doing this, with me having to interact with the system every 3 minutes.

c) Add a setting that lets admins specify a default "permanently delete" age where AppColl automatically permanently deletes items in the trash that are over X days old.

And a minor quibble:

d) There are two buttons: "Permanently Delete" and "Empty Trash." They do the same thing, except that the former only deletes the items that are selected and the latter deletes ALL items in the trash. Maybe they should be relabeled "Permanently Delete Selected Items" and "Permanently Delete ALL Items."

Just upvoted your original idea, Sadiq.

Or maybe AppColl could just introduce a new FormField called "FirstNickname" that used the Nickname if present and the First if not.

Although your approach would be more flexible in case similar substitutions are needed in other cases.

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.

@GreggH8509 I think Tar's original idea would provide usefulness beyond what the transient task approach would. For example, it might be that a particular matter has certain sensitivities, e.g., requires special handling (perhaps due to a licensee's requirements, litigation considerations, etc.), and having it so that there was a pop-up that came up if you ever brought that matter's matter details up could put it front-and-center to the user that there is something important about the case....

To that end, it might also be useful to have a "private notes" field for both tasks and matters (like exists for Contact records) that could be used to store such info. "Notes" could be used to store more verbose info, e.g., text from client emails, etc., whereas "Private Notes" could be used to store more concise info, e.g., "MATTER SUBJECT TO LITIGATION HOLD" or "CLIENT MUST PREPAY" that could be popped up in the pop-up that Tar mentions.

It would be nice if there was a way to easily copy the data for a report into the clipboard. Right now, if you want to copy and paste a report into a different program, you have a few options, none of which are that satisfactory:

a) Copy and paste from the reports interface in AppColl. This, however, will require multiple such copy/pastes if the report is multiple pages, and pasting the results seems to not result in a table-formatted dataset.

b) Print the report, but cancel the print job dialog box. The browser will produce a print-friendly formatted webpage that includes all report records. You can then manually select all records, copy, and paste. This is generally fine, but requires the user to have to print, cancel, manually select, and copy.

c) Save the report as an Excel or CSV file. Then open it, copy the desired table, and copy it. For tables that have application serial numbers, you may need to manually fix serial numbers that are long enough that Excel automatically puts them into scientific notation format (CN numbers, for example).

These are all cumbersome--what would be nice is if AppColl offered a "Copy Report to Clipboard" button that would, in effect, perform (b) or (c) without any further user interaction.

Small improvement suggestion--in the Form Fields Sidebar/Task Pane (accessible via the Hide/Show History/Discussion link), there is a neat list of all form fields that are available, as well as the data that each would contain for the current matter if used.

It would be really nice if there was a way that a user could just click on any of those form fields and it would copy the text that would be used in that field into the clipboard. For example, if I want to get a list of inventors, clicking the "{Matter.Inventors}" form field would copy the list of inventors to the clipboard (so I can then past it elsewhere).

This would save the trouble of having to make a report with the Inventors field, getting it into print view, and then selecting and copying the desired data.

@GreggH8509 Great, thank you--would be very helpful!

Hi George,

If you are looking for automated email templates with this feature, there is a workaround that you can use to get to a similar end result. Create a transient task for each desired "flavor" of email that you want to send out and use whatever triggers you want to control under what conditions each transient task fires. Each transient task can have its own notifications set up, so you could have two different transient tasks that trigger when a Pay Issue Fee task dockets--one for small entity and one for large entity (bonus--you can include language in the small entity version reminding the client to inform you if they are no longer small entity).

But that only works if you are automatically sending these emails out, so maybe not a good fit for what you are wanting to do.

Windows has a somewhat arbitrary (and aggravatingly pointless--NTFS can support filenames of thousands of characters!) limit on path and file name length that causes all sorts of issues with files downloaded from AppColl's Files module. This is particularly problematic due to the way that AppColl names email files, which are automatically assigned a name starting with a 23-character timestamp, followed by the email address of the sender, followed by the entire subject line of the email.

This can easily result in emails that have filenames of 200+ characters, 25% of which are consumed by the timestamp and sender email address. This wrecks havoc with Windows' default filename length (260 characters?). For example, I tried to access a ZIP file of files downloaded from a matter today and found that the only way I could extract the ZIP file was to put it in a folder named "1" in my root directory and then rename the ZIP file to 2.zip before extracting it. This resulted in filenames/paths that were short enough to allow all of the files to successfully extract, but it is cumbersome--for example, one would then need to go through and rename all of the too-long files to shorten them if they are to be copied to some more useful location.

It would be great if AppColl gave users the option to specify a max path/filename length for files to have when downloading documents/files from AppColl. For example, provide a pop-up when a user clicks the Download ZIP File button that allows a user to specify a character limit (it can be set to only allow numbers within a certain range to be specified). If a number is entered, then all files being added to the ZIP file would have their path+filenames+zipfile name truncated to be no longer than the specified length as they are added to the ZIP file (the filenames in AppColl would stay the same). If no number is specified, then no truncation would occur. Truncated names that would result in duplicate names could have [XXX] added to the end, with zero-padded sequential numbers replacing the XXX.

This would allow users to specify a max length that was compatible with wherever that ZIP file is going to be placed, allowing it to be successfully extracted once in the destination location.

An alternative/supplemental feature to this would be to have a text input box instead of (or in addition to) the length input control; the user could copy and paste the destination path in that text input box, and AppColl could simply count the character length of it and then automatically adjust the filename length to meet the requirements of Windows.

Cheers,
Christian

It would be really great if task notification emails could be set up to be triggerable based on task metadata. For example, it would be great if a notification for a task could be set up to only be sent out if the Matter.Client was a particular client or if Matter.CountryCode = "CN"--you get the idea. This would allow a single task to have multiple potential notifications that could be sent out in the alternative based on matter-specific data.

The only way to do this now is to either:

a) Have multiple separate tasks, each with its own set of notifications that are tailored to a particular metadata condition. However, this results in having different tasks for different clients/countries/etc., which is confusing on the docket and makes it very cumbersome to manage how tasks trigger (for example, if you have 10 different flavors of what is the same task (except for the notifications), you'd have to revise 10 separate tasks if there was any revision needed, e.g., to task triggering.

b) Have (b), but make them each a transient task that triggers off a common task type. Each transient task would only trigger off that common task type if certain other conditions were met, e.g., if the common task was in a particular client's docket or in a matter in a particular jurisdiction. The transient tasks would have the customized notifications. However, this still results in potentially a large number of different task types--we already have 600+ task types, and we'd like to avoid having hundreds more that are just there to provide different notifications....

Cheers,
Christian

@MikeO5888 I second Bernd's suggestion--I've actually suggested this to Support in the past, prior to the forum's existence. This would be a trivial addition to the GUI--the hyperlink needs data that is already retrieved from the database, so little effort needed to implement.

Google patents is not as useful as Patent Center--it lags Patent Center and it also doesn't include all the other information, such as the IFW, that Patent Center has. It also does not include non-published cases.

If this is implemented, would recommend also having a direct link to the IFW for each matter. Same hyperlink, but with some sub-folders specified:

https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/<APPNO>/ifw/docs

Christian

@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

@joe-appcoll-com Thanks, Joe--glad to hear this.

For (c), couldn't you just have a boolean flag for each sync in a sync recipient's account that has to be "true" for the sync to be processed? You could set it up so that it defaults to "false" for any newly set up sync and is only switched to "true" once the admin on the recipient account reviews the synced field enablement/mapping and approves it.

If you did that, it seems like it would be relatively trivial to then cause that boolean flag for a sync to switch back to false if the underlying report for that sync was overwritten, thus forcing the recipient admin to review and approve the updated sync fields.

Of course, have no idea of what goes on under the hood. Figured I'd offer the above in case it was helpful.

@joe-appcoll-com Hi Joe,

I took a look at this, and while the changes are really nice, I have a few suggestions/questions:

a) The mapping seems like it really should be something that the receiving party gets to specify. Right now, it's the source of the sync that gets to specify the mapping, but the recipient of the sync is the one that would generally know where the data should go. This isn't too big a deal, but it seemed kind of odd to do it this way. It requires more communication/interaction between the account admins this way. If the recipient is given this capability instead, then the source admin doesn't really need to do anything going forward--if the recipient decides they want to shift how things are mapped, no need for the source admin to be involved. Under the present system, the source admin would need to be looped in to make such changes....

b) The mapping doesn't seem to account for the custom/user fields from the source account to be mapped to any fields on the recipient side. I see that the source side can map non-custom/user fields on the source side to custom/user fields on the recipient side, but there isn't an ability to specify how data stored in custom/user fields on the source side gets stored on the recipient side.

c) It wasn't clear to me whether or not there was any feature that prevented a new sync or sync where the underlying report had been edited from syncing until the recipient admin reviewed and approved--is that feature included now? The idea would be that no sync could be initiated without the receiving admin being given a chance to review and approve/disapprove of the proposed sync field list/mappings. This might be present, but I didn't have a good way of testing/exploring it.