Hi Everyone,

Often I am asked how do we send marketing letters or print address labels to specific customers and or patients based on a range of criteria such as customer classification, patient species, breed, date of birth etc.

Previously it was only possible to print reports through OpenVPMS or go directly to the database via a sql query to extract the data. The former was no use for batch merging and the later was too complicated for your typical user so had to be setup and performed by the local implementer or integrator.

In version 1.4 we added a new feature in the Reporting->Reports workspace that allows you to not only Preview and Print the report but also Export the report data in CSV (a standard export) format which can be then be used by any Word Pressing or even another database system to do batch printing of Letters, Envelops and Labels.

In order for this to work though the report had to be formatted especially for this purpose as some of the standard printed report formatting could interfere with the format of the data exported. I have recently completed two new export reports that are targeted at customer and patient marketing. These can be found here:

http://www.openvpms.org/customisation/customer-marketing-export-report
http://www.openvpms.org/customisation/patient-marketing-export-report

Once the data has been exported into a file you can utilise the standard merging process in Open Offcie or Word to do the merging. Here is a link to a good document on how to do this in Open Office:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/How_Tos/Creating_...

I believe these reports are a good start but over time I expect user feedback to request more filtering options as well as new reports that can be used to target customers and patients who have purchased specific products.

I hope providing these examples of how flexible OpenVPMS is regarding it's reporting and marketing features will encourage other users to provide similar reports that the community can use. I look forward to the results. :-)

Cheers
Tony