When a new firm signs on to MerusCase, their correspondence is converted into templates to be used and reused across all of their cases. Many of these templates won't change over time, however, some of them will need to be updated occasionally. Most of our clients will elect to rely on our expertise, asking us to make these changes for them. A few, though, will take it upon themselves to make these changes.

When first opening a letter which has been saved as a template, one may be taken aback at the range of merge fields, which, put simply, function as placeholders for information to be filled in later, in our case by merging a letter within Merus. There are a wide range of these merge fields available, giving one the breadth and depth necessary to create any letter they may possibly need, however, I want to focus on one set in particular, the address block.

The address block fields are available for any party or company available in Merus, such as an employer, an applicant, or a claims adjuster to name a few. It is a quick, and handy, alternative to inserting each component of a party's address individually, however, there are a few things to keep in mind when using it. 

MerusCase Support is always here to help with MerusCase-related problems, but the line between a MerusCase problem and a local IT problem is sometimes quite blurry: MerusCase runs in a browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox and creates Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF documents, and problems with any one of these different products are difficult for users to distinguish from problems with MerusCase.

Our policy for these kinds of local IT problems has always been to inform the user when such a problem is better handled by their tech support rather than MerusCase Support, but we also frequently offer to fix the problem on the first or second occurrence. We're very concerned with making our clients happy, and we're willing to do these kinds of IT fixes once or twice as a gesture of goodwill.

Even our goodwill is taxed when these other products make unwanted changes or introduce bugs. We've had, for example, a handful of users call and email us over the last few weeks complaining of trouble opening court forms and other PDFs. All of these users have Google Chrome, and all of them also have Adobe Reader installed to view their PDFs...and an update to one of them was causing Adobe Reader in Chrome to get stuck at a black screen.