Amicus Contradictions

Amicus now strongly recommends that you NOT associate all firm members to files and contacts because of the additional computing load. According to Amicus, failure to abide by this guideline will make “your workflow cumbersome, provides no benefits, and results in performance degradation.” To offset this you can now see “all Firm” files and contacts. Sounds good.

Another significant improvement in PE 2009 was the increased ease in viewing other calendars. So in a firm with 3 or 4 attorneys, the receptionist can simply have a group calendar open on her desk at all times and know what all the attorneys are doing, what clients they have appointments with, etc.

OOPS!  Wait a minute. It turns out that if you do not assign a user to a file, that user cannot see the content of an appointment for a matter to which they are not assigned. It comes up as if it were a private appointment and the details are not visible.

So if you follow the strong recommendation about not associating firm members to files, you disable one of the really convenient, time-saving, ease of use functions of the program.  Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

According to Amicus, the fact that receptionists and paralegals cannot see the content of the appointment means that “you can see that someone is booked but not why. This privacy restriction reflects what the vast majority of our customers have asked for.” 

Now it may be that what the “vast majority” of Amicus customers ask for is the total opposite of what the virtual unanimity of my clients want, but somehow I don’t think so. Furthermore, since the program already has a setting to see “all Firm Files” in addition to the files to which a user is assigned, one might suppose it would not be too difficult to port this over to appointments, so that if you can see “firm files” then you can see “firm appointments.”

With a yearly release schedule, this is the sort of problem that is likely to get a response “will be fixed in the next version.” But this is just an excuse to get people on to the upgrade treadmill what is known in the financial industry as churning clients) rather than treating significant design issues as bugs (or if you will “Working as Poorly Designed”) and fixing them.

Comments

[David Thompson]

John: Your comments re viewing other's appointments are well taken. We have complained to Amicus several times over the past year only to be told the same things you have noted. HOWEVER, perhaps persistence pays off - By email May 12, 2009 we received the following note from Dale Wainwright, Product Director, Amicus Attorney:

"Thank you for your emails on this issue. You are correct. The Security Profile that exposes Firm Files and Contacts should in fact expose the details of Events assigned to Files and Contacts. That was the intention. This issue has been logged as a bug. And please note that it is not recommended that you assign everyone to everything, especially if you are using third party links. This can result in having an adverse affect on overall performance as the Server must maintain transactions for every relationship each time an item is created and/or edited."

Regards, David Thompson, London, Ontario

[John Heckman]

David,
Exactly. And if it has been identified as a BUG, then it should be fixed with a Service Pack in THIS version and not be told "wait until next version." This sort of thing is a large part of the reason why yearly updates amount to little more than a mechanism for milking clients for all they are worth. Clients should not have to pay for bug fixes that are known relatively early in the product cycle