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Tag: Dovetail Agent

Announcing a New Product Release…

January 12, 2009 This is always a good sign for a software company, and here at Dovetail Software this has just become an easier task. It is important for us to get the news about a new product release to our customers. By automating some of the steps in this task, we can get the information to the customer faster, and also add some business value to the process. Now when a new release is ready, we can use the new Product Announcement tool to prepare the message for our customers. Opening this application from within our in-house version of Dovetail Agent, we can see a list of all of our products that are currently under contract with any of our customers. Clicking on one of the products will retrieve all of the customers under contract, and show a second grid filled with…

Improving case history

The case history within Clarify has always been a bit of a sore spot with users for a long time. It was good - in that it made it easy to quickly review the details of the case. But, it did have its issues: Its just one giant text blob. You have no control over the formatting. Its in chronological order. Sometimes this is OK, but typically you scroll to the bottom to read the most recent activity. You don't have control over the timestamp format (DD/MM/YY vs. MM/DD/YY, as an example). The timezone of the timestamp isn't clear. It isn't easy to hide/remove certain entries. Its limited to 32K. If the case history his its 32K limit, users would see this message: THIS FIELD HAS EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. THE ABOVE ENTRY MAY HAVE BEEN TRUNCATED. PLEASE REFER TO…

Improved Case and Solution linking workflow within Dovetail Agent

November 18, 2008 One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough.   This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements.   Making it easier for agents to link solutions and cases would certainly be beneficial. If its hard, they're less likely to do it. So, make it easy.     Dovetail Agent (version 4.0) has simplified the ability to link a solution to one or more cases. Regardless of how you get to a Solution (via Search, Find by ID, or simply opening it from a queue or WIPbin), you can easily link the Solution to one (or more) of your…

Commenting on Solutions

September 29, 2008 One of the things I've wanted to do for a long time is have the ability to add comments on objects within the Clarify/Dovetail system. As a specific example, I've wanted to be able to add comments to a solution. For those not versed in Clarify/Dovetail speak, a Solution is essentially a KnowledgeBase (KB) article. By allowing comments, I (and others) can (hopefully) enhance the information that is within the Solution. For example, consider a  KB article that is available on the web, such as a Microsoft KB article, or a Dovetail KB article. Now, lets say that I use the information in that article, but I run into a bit of a snag, discover another tip or workaround, or perhaps I've even found something wrong in that article. What can I do? I'd like to be able to leave…

Run-Time Query Parameter Evaluation

September 22, 2008 Overview One of the new features coming soon in Dovetail Agent 4.1 is the enhanced capability of using parameters in fcQuery that will be evaluated when a query is executed. This allows queries to be designed with much more flexible structure. Dates are a very important parameter to be evaluated at run-time, and being able to build the query to do this automatically keeps the user from having to enter the date manually when running the query. Queries can be created to look at specific date-oriented information (i.e. This Week) without having to change to values of the date parameters each time the query is run. Shared queries are also a very easy place to see where run-time evaluation of a query parameter will be helpful. For example, if a query is created (and shared to all users) to find…

My first Ubiquity command : view a case in Dovetail

September 8, 2008 I was pretty excited to play with Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension that lets me think and act in a more natural language with my PC. From the Ubiquity Tutorial: Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web. You're used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar. With Ubiquity installed, you'll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box. The commands that come with Ubiquity are just the beginning: anyone can create new commands and share them. Some of the built-in commands include: add-to-calendar calculate define ebay-search email flickr google map search tinyurl weather zoom After playing with the build-in commands, I was ready to try and write my…

Spell Check feature added to Dovetail Agent

August 26, 2008 As part of the continuous effort to enhance and improve our applications, a new Spell Check feature was added for the next release of Dovetail Agent. This feature was added for every text area input in the pages of Agent. Currently there are almost 100 different pages in Dovetail Agent that use text area controls. Adding the new functionality to every page individually would be one way of implementing the change, but certainly not the most efficient. Instead, the new functionality is added dynamically to each page as it is opened in the browser. This approach makes a lot of sense. Since the code that adds the link under each text area is contained in one file, any future modifications will be very easy as well. The Spell Check feature is made available to the user by adding a Check…

Customizing Seeker: Indexing and Searching Custom Objects

August 15, 2008 In previous posts, we've covered the basics of Seeker, along with searching custom attributes of an object (such as case.x_notes).Continuing on, lets look at how to index and search custom objects.In our environment, we keep track of the software license keys that we send to our customers, and we do this in our Dovetail system.This is an entirely custom object, so this will make a great example.The License Key TableUsing BOLT, we can quickly see what this table looks like:We need to know the database table information so we can modify the documentSpecifications.xml file. Modify the documentSpecifications.xml fileSeek.exe is the application that performs the actual indexing. The documentSpecifications.xml is the configuration file that seek.exe uses so that it knows what to index.The documentSpecifications.xml file consists of many dovetailDocumentSpecifications. For example, there is a specification for case, one for subcase, one for…

Customizing Seeker: Searching custom data

July 30, 2008 In a previous post, I covered some details on Seeker - our full-text search engine, along with its integration with applications, such as Dovetail Agent. One of the other things I really like about Seeker is its extensibility. Via configuration, Seeker can easily be extended to search additional (including custom) fields (such as a custom field on the case or solution). Here we'll cover that scenario. Modify the documentSpecifications.xml file Seek.exe is the application that performs the actual indexing. The documentSpecifications.xml is the configuration file that seek.exe uses so that it knows what to index. The documentSpecifications.xml file consists of many dovetailDocumentSpecifications. For example, there is a specification for case, one for subcase, one for solution, etc. The contents section determines what columns are searched. For example, the baseline contents for the case object includes id_number, title, and case_history: <contents>…