New features and enhancements
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,
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 database 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.
