Kathy,
The primary advantage to Office 365 use is the cost savings from the Microsoft application purchase. Both Office 365 (Subscription service) and Office 2016 (Application) will be confirmed for integrated use with OrthoTrac as of our version 14.1 release that will begin distribution within the next 2 weeks. If your office will be using Office 365 with MS Office 2013, and you can await a couple weeks for OrthoTrac version 14.1, we would recommend that you do so.
If your office plans to upgrade to Office 2016 with your the Office 365 subscription service there is an issue that you should be aware of. Even thought MS Office 2016 applications will work in various functions of OrthoTrac, there is a problem with OrthoTrac, MS Outlook 2016, and MS Word 2016 that will prevent letters in the OrthoTrac AWPS system to be emailed directly from the post and print process of OrthoTrac. You can still save a merged AWPS letter as a .pdf and individually email it to a patient, responsible party or outside doctor, but the integrated email function for the letters will not work with Office 2016 at this time.
Our developers will be correcting the Outlook email issue in version 14.2, which is projected to be released in August 2018. So, depending on your practice's needs, you could choose to wait to upgrade your MS Office products until later this year.
Thank you,
Mara
