AppColl Tandem accounts are a great solution for clients requesting direct access to their IP information in your account.

You can invite your clients to setup a no-cost Tandem account and receive updates of their data from your account. AppColl Tandem accounts receive data via the Account Syncing feature of AppColl PM Plus. For more information, click here.

Check the bottom of this article for a video overview of the Tandem Invitation process.

Testing/previewing a Tandem Invitation

You may wish to preview exactly what a client will see as a result of you sending an invitation to a customer to setup a Tandem account. By using the 'Test Tandem Invite' command, you can create a test account that will contain exactly the information that will be in your client's Tandem account after syncing from your account. To create a test account, click on the 'Test Tandem Invite' button and enter the name of the contact that will be sent the Tandem invite. This must be the same contact that you specify in the the 'To' field for the Tandem invitation.

After entering the contact, click on 'Test'. This will create your Tandem test account (if it doesn't exist or clear the data in the test account if it does), and sync your client's information into the test account. Please note that syncing to the test account can take many minutes depending on the number of matters being synced. When complete, your login will now have access to both your primary account and your Tandem test account. You can switch to the Tandem test account by clicking on your initials in the upper right of the page, selecting 'Switch Accounts' and clicking on '<your account name> Tandem Test'. 

When you next login you will also be given the opportunity to login to either the primary or Tandem test accounts.

You only have one Tandem test account. Every time you click on the 'Test Tandem Invite' button your test account is cleared and data if synced for the new specified client.

Sending an Invitation to a client to setup a Tandem Account

To invite one of your clients to setup Tandem account do the following:

1. From the Settings page, select the Account Syncing tab and click on the Send Tandem Invite button.
2. If required changed the name of the contact sending the email.
3. Enter the name of a contact to receive the invite. To appear in the list of possible recipients, a contact must be associated with a client and must have an email address. Role that allow for this include, Corporate Counsel, Employee, Inventor and Manager. You can manually change the client associated with the contact for the invite. This could be useful, for example, when sending an invite to a contractor that works for multiple clients.
4. You can edit the text in the email before sending. Some special fields are available to insert information into the email.

5. Click Send. Note that the text you typed will be saved to be reloaded when you next send an invitation.

All invitation links are only valid for 7 days. After that, you will need to resend the invitation. If the client wants to use a different email address as their login user name, you will need to resend the email to the correct address.

Reviewing Previous Invitations

All invite emails are saved in Files module in a folder called ‘TandemInvites’. You can click on the View Tandem Invites button from the settings page to see previous invitations. In the Notes column in the list, you can see if a client has accepted your invitation.

What Happens When an Invitation is Accepted?

When a client accepts your invitation to setup an account, several things happen.

• An email is sent to the sender indicating the invitation has been accepted.
• The Tandem account is created for the client with the email address as their login user name.
• An account syncing configuration is created to automatically transfer information between your account and the client’s account. By default, this configuration syncs the follow information:

• An account sync is scheduled for the early morning of the next day. If you want to send the data immediately click on the Sync Now button in the Account Syncing tab of the settings page.

You can send invitations to multiple people within a client. The first person to accept will create the Tandem account and setup the syncing. Subsequent accepts will simply create logins to the existing Tandem account.

Changing the Account Syncing Between your Account and Client’s Account

To temporarily disable the nightly syncing of data, uncheck the Enabled column next to the syncing record for the client.

To stop the syncing completely, click on the trash can on the right of the syncing record for the client.

To change the data being synced, click on the Edit button on the right of the syncing record or go to the Matters module and modify the ‘Tandem Matter Sync - <client name>’ report to change the matters and/or fields being sent.