Introduction

This month I just want to recap a bunch of little tweaks, changes, and features that were implemented recently in HostedSuite

Calendar Attachment Support (ICS)

Yes, it’s finally here due to popular request, all scheduling related emails (e.g. confirmations, cancellations, reschedules) all have a calendar format attachment so that Outlook, Google Apps, etc. can add the reservation directly to your calendar.

We support the initial scheduling but also reschedules and cancellations.

This feature is enabled already and you should start seeing these attachments on your scheduling emails today.

 

Improved Logging

We have changed the way that we handle log files now to allow for better tracking of issues that occur over long periods of time.

Previously, we had a single log file “HostedSuite.log” which was always overwritten when it got too big. We did this to simplify support and to reduce the amount of log files generated however this led to situations where a problem could occur and the client would restart the service thus overwriting the log file and losing valuable support information.

The way we handle this now is to always have a backlog of 5 days worth of log files. Each log file is named in the format year-month-day-hour so that we can quickly determine which log file will contain information needed to troubleshoot an error.

 

More Category Icons

Category icons have turned out to be a surprisingly popular feature. Since you can assign clients to categories and have the icon show up on incoming calls, they allow operators to quickly identify certain types of clients. We have added about 50 more icons to the list for even better classification.

Note that if you assign a client to a category that has a Call Box Icon specified, that icon will show up on the incoming call, for example:

Call Allowance Notifications

We now support the ability to send a client an email once their call allowance has expired. In order to set this up you need to take a few steps.

First – under Organization > Centers, Edit the Center(s) that you have listed and under Billing, make sure to set your billing cycle to the appropriate values. This will determine the date range that we use to calculate the usage for.

Next – under Organization > Clients, Edit the client record for any clients that want this notification and check the “Notify client when call allowance goes over” box located where you configure their allowance.

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, go into Organization > Contacts and edit any people that will be notified and make sure the Notify box is checked on their Email Address

IMPORTANT Please note that after these changes we will start keeping track of the client’s allowance usage throughout the month, but we will not take into account previous usage during the current billing period. This basically means that if you turn this feature on mid month and the client goes over, an email will not go out. However the next FULL billing cycle that this is enabled for will calculate correctly. This is for performance reasons.

Conclusion

In addition to these major features, there were also a ton of bug fixes and little tweaks that are too numerous to mention. There are also some big features in the pipeline including Zoom integration into the scheduler so stay tuned.