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Tag: Dovetail Agent

Log Email using your mail application (such as Outlook)

October 11, 2010 A while ago I posted about using email with Dovetail/Clarify. One of the items I talked about is the Enhanced Email Out functionality within Dovetail Agent, which is a client-side integration with your MS Outlook client. This allows users to access their address books, attach files to the outgoing email, use your signature, read/delivery receipts, etc.   The way this is accomplished in via Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), a Microsoft library that exposes the interfaces of the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI).  There area few downsides of using CDO, including the need to install CDO on each desktop, Outlook warnings/restrictions, and troubles with Office 2010. It’s not really a surprise – having a web application be able to access your Outlook application has the potential for security trouble. Use your mail client   An alternative to this is to simply pop open a…

IIS Configuration and Permissions for remote file attachments

September 1, 2010 While setting up some advanced capabilities of DovetailAgent, we ran into some IIS/Windows permission issues. This post is to capture and share some of the learnings.   To start with, Kevin Miller has a good post on installing Classic ASP web application on IIS7.   The “advanced” capabilities I’m referring to was setting up file attachment uploads, and saving those files off to a permanent file storage area, accessed by a UNC drive such as \\fileServer\attachments   Environment: Windows Server 2008, Dovetail Agent 4.3 File Uploads   The way file uploads work is that the file is first uploaded to the web server where DovetailAgent is running. Then, the application moves the file to the permanent storage location, which is commonly a share on a different server. The application also creates directories and subdirectories where needed. So if your base attachment directory is\\fileServer\attachments,…

Segregating your data using Data Restriction

August 23, 2010 The Dovetail SDK (fcSDK) includes Data Restriction Technology.Data Restriction allows you to segregate your Clarify/Dovetail database so that different sets of users can use the same forms (and customizations), yet see different sets of data from the database. This can include any items such as cases, sites, contacts, parts, etc.   For example, suppose you have two different groups that support different product lines. You might set up Data Restriction so that the users in group 1 can only see group 1's sites, contacts, solutions, cases, and parts. Likewise, group 2 would only see their data. The user’s do not even know that they are not seeing all of the data from the database. Data Restriction based on Geography   A common data restriction setup is to segregate data via geography. For example, users in Europe may only see data (cases, contacts, sites,…

Closing (and reopening) a solution

August 18, 2010 A not-so-uncommon request I’ve heard over the years is the need to be able to close a solution. You can close a case, close an action item, close an opportunity – but you can’t close a solution in the out-of-the-box product. But this is a pretty easy customization – so lets walk through it. Why close a solution?   Knowledge can become outdated. But we may want to retain that knowledge, especially when we’ve linked these solutions to cases or change requests. By closing it, we can mark it as no longer relevant, and closing will also remove it from a user’s wipbin and all queues. Status and Condition   Most workflow objects have a status and a condition. We can use a similar mechanism here. We’ll use the Open and Closed Conditions (same as for a case). I create a…

Dovetail Seeker Sneak Preview

July 27, 2010 Kevin Miller did a recent sneak preview of Dovetail Seeker 2.0, which we’re hard at work on here.Here’s an additional sneak preview of search capabilities from the Agent side of things.Search attachmentsSearch case attachments, solution attachments, etc.Search external documentsSearch product documentation, whitepapers, technical bulletins, etc.

Socialcast Integration, Episode 2: The UI

June 24, 2010 In a previous post, I discussed how to publish activities from your Clarify/Dovetail CRM system into Socialcast. Cool stuff.Continuing on this same line, I wanted to explore having access to Socialcast within your CRM application UI. Since this is where agents spend a good deal of their day, why not have a widget that shows their home stream, and allows them to share, update, and comment?Socialcast widgetWe can easily embed a Socialcast widget right onto the agent’s console within DovetailAgent. This would allow agents to see their home stream, post an update, or comment on someone else’s post.We can use the Google Gmail gadget provided by Socialcast to do this. Normally this is used as a gadget within Gmail or iGoogle, but we can use it anywhere we want.Once you’re logged into your Socialcast site, navigate to the Socialcast Applications…

Solution Workflow

April 14, 2010 When we talk about workflow within our CRM systems, we commonly talk about cases, subcases, part requests, etc. But every queueable object within our Clarify/Dovetail system can have its own workflow. Including Solutions. Many people don’t think about a workflow around their knowledge. I wanted to touch on this, and show an example of a business process, or a workflow, for Solutions. Quick recap: what is a Solution? A Solution is a description of a known problem with one or more workarounds and/or resolutions. It is a piece of re-usable knowledge. Some refer to it as a KB or KnowledgeBase article. Here’s what a Solution looks like within DovetailAgent: Pretty simple. An ID number, a title, a status, a description of the problem, and one or more workarounds/resolutions. Simple Workflow Here’s an example of a simple workflow for a Solution:…

Saving Searches in Dovetail applications

September 21, 2009 Saving Searches in Dovetail AgentOne of the things under development for the next version of Dovetail Agent is the ability to save your favorite searches.Here’s a screenshot:So you can now save your searches, and easily execute them again at anytime.You can also name a search. By default, the name of the search will be the search terms. But you can rename it to whatever you want. For example, as opposed to a search being named: “squeaking washer condition:open casetype:problem” You may choose to rename it as “open cases for squeaky washer”Look for this functionality in the next release of Dovetail Agent.Saving Searches in Dovetail Mobile Agent and Agent LiteCurrently, we don’t have Saved Searches in Dovetail Mobile Agent or Agent Lite. This is on the enhancement list for the future.But, you can easily save a search today by simply using…

Some notes on using Oracle 11 Database Instant Client

September 16, 2009 I recently upgraded my day-to-day environment to Windows 7 (64-bit) using MSSQL 2008. This week I needed to do some Oracle work, so I needed to get DovetailAgent working with an Oracle 9 (technically 9.2.0.1.0) database, so I needed Oracle client software. The latest Oracle client version is 11, so I decided to give that a try. The actual Oracle database runs on a VM, so I just needed an Oracle client.   Here are a few notes about getting this working. Install Oracle Instant Client   Install the Oracle 11 Instant Client for your platform.   I installed mine into C:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1   I went to edit the tnsnames.ora file, and quickly realized that there wasn’t one. A little googling led me to a helpful blog post at DBAToolZ. Environment Variables   Following the instructions from that blog post, I created a new system environment…

Hiding Empty Queues in Dovetail Agent

August 3, 2009 I was recently at a customer site, and while sitting down with one of their agents, noticed that this agent belonged to over 100 queues. Because of this, the left column of the console within DovetailAgent, which shows all of the queues, had a scrollbar that seemed to scroll forever. One of the features I like about Dovetail Mobile is that it only shows the queues that have stuff in them. I immediately said: why don't we do a similar thing within DovetailAgent? And because we have more screen real estate to work with on a desktop (as opposed to the limited screen real estate on a mobile device), I thought about allowing the empty queues to be toggled on and off. Easy enough to do. Here's what I ended up with. (I'm showing the end result with pictures first,…