Tag: rulemanager

Introducing Personal Slack Notifications using Dovetail Rulemanager

August 21, 2018 When employees are notified as part of a business rule action, the notification method is determined by the employee’s notification preference. We've recently added support for Slack as a personal notification preference. The default notification methods are: Email Notifier Forward to my Supervisor Tone Pager Text Pager Digital Pager None Dovetail Rulemanager also supports SMS, which will send an SMS message (text message) to an employee’s configured device, typically their mobile phone. Refer to a previous post SMS Notifications using Dovetail Rulemanager. Now, Dovetail Rulemanager also supports Slack as a notification preference. Instead of getting notified by email, a user can choose to receive notifications within Slack. What is Slack Slack is essentially a chat room and messaging platform for your whole company, commonly used to replace email as your primary method of communication and sharing. Slack Notifications Instead of getting notified by email, a user…

How to Quickly Test Dovetail Carrier Messages

October 24, 2017 A common workflow is to have a business rule fire, and that business rule will send Dovetail Carrier a message. For example, when a customer updates a case via SelfService, we can have a business rule fire that sends an SDK Toolkit message to Carrier, and Carrier will change the case status to "Customer Update". Complete end-to-end Testing When I'm putting this all together, and testing it out, a full integration test would be to log into SelfService, and log a note to a case. That would cause Rulemanager to fire a business rule which would send the message to Carrier, then Carrier can do its thing. So I have multiple apps in play here: Dovetail Agent, for setting up the business rule Dovetail SelfService, which is how the customer updates a case Dovetail Rulemanager, which processes the business rule…

Finding a Business Rule based on its message

September 26, 2017 If you receive a business rule notification message, but you're unsure as to exactly which business rule it came from, there's a few ways to find the originating rule. Notification Message For example, lets say that you received the following notification: Email Notification How do I find which business rule caused this notification to be sent? There's actually a few options here. 1. Dovetail Agent - Query Business Rule Actions Using Dovetail Agent, create a query for Business Rule Actions Dovetail Agent - Query Business Rule Actions And filter for Message Contains something happened This will show you a list of rules that contain that string in the message. Dovetail Agent - Query Results Clicking one of the results will take you to the Business Rule itself. [caption id="attachment_7594"…

Business Rule Usage Reports in Dovetail Agent

September 12, 2017 A few years ago I wrote a post titled Getting the most out of your business rules. Most of the information in that post is still relevant today. In that post, I discussed how we can analyze the data inside our database to see which rules are firing and how often. We can do this using a Business Rule Usage Report. This report tells us what business rules are firing along with how often. Perhaps even more importantly, it allows you to see the rules that are not being fired. Perhaps those rules could be removed, or made inactive, therefore simplifying business rule administration. Or maybe they should be firing, and need further investigation.These reports are now available within Dovetail Agent. Makes sense to have this data available right alongside where you create and edit your business rules. Business Rule Usage ReportFrom the Manage…

Parent-Child Cases Extension in Dovetail Carrier

September 5, 2017 One of the available extensions within Dovetail Carrier is the Parent-Child Cases Extension, which allows for automating workflow processes involving parent and child cases. Quick Refresher on Parent and Child CasesWith parent and child cases, we can relate a group of similar problems with a root cause. The parent case identifies the root cause. A child case is a customer problem that arises due to the root cause and is linked to the parent case.For example, suppose someone knocks out a utility pole, which causes an internet outage for many customers.Each customer may call into the call center and report the outage. We can relate all of these cases to a parent case, which is where the repair is being tracked. Updates on the repair are tracked within the parent case. Only one case needs to be updated, thus removing duplicate…

New in Dovetail – Configuration Item Rule Properties

August 29, 2017 We've recently added support for Configuration Item Rule Properties in Dovetail Rulemanager and Dovetail Agent. In this post I'll cover what they are, why you'd want to use them, as well as a few examples. First, a quick refresher on Rule Properties and Config Items. Rule Properties Business Rule Properties are used in a number of places throughout the Dovetail suite, including: Business Rule Conditions Business Rule Action Messages Canned Response Variables Email Log Templates Traditionally, a rule property would traverse a path through the schema, starting from the base object, and ending at a column. For example, the Contact First Name property for a case would use the path case_reporter2contact:first_name. However, there are instances where a static value may be desired, and this static value cannot be traversed to via a schema path. In these instances, a Configuration Item Rule Property is…

SMS Notifications using Dovetail Rulemanager

August 15, 2017 When employees are notified as part of a business rule action, the notification method is determined by the employee's notification preference. The default notification methods are:EmailNotifierForward to my SupervisorTone PagerText PagerDigital PagerNoneDovetail Rulemanager recently added support for one additional option: SMSAn SMS notification will send an SMS message (text message) to an employee's configured device, typically their mobile phone. SMS Notification Message Users can set their notification preferences for SMS, just like any other preference. SMS Notification PreferenceCouldn't we do this before?In the past, if you wanted to send SMS messages, we would typically use a custom replacement paging application for Rulemanager. This custom script would call into a 3rd party web service, or use the cell provider’s email to SMS gateway. These solutions all required custom scripts, and ended up being additional processes that Rulemanager needed to…

Introducing the Webhooks Extension in Dovetail Carrier

August 8, 2017 We recently added a new extension to Dovetail Carrier - a Webhooks Extension. What's a webhook?Webhooks are "user-defined HTTP callbacks". They are usually triggered by some event, such as pushing code to a repository or a comment being posted to a blog. When that event occurs, the source site makes an HTTP request to the URI configured for the webhook. Users can configure them to cause events on one site to invoke behavior on another. The action taken may be anything.This allows for making a web request based on an event within your Clarify/Dovetail system. A business rule can fire based on the event. Dovetail Rulemanager will evaluate the rule, and send a message to Dovetail Carrier. With the webhooks extension, that message can tell Carrier to make an HTTP request.When Carrier receives a message with a type of InvokeUrl, the…

Free Collection of Business Rule Recipes

July 10, 2017 I've often stated that Rulemanager and Business Rules within Clarify/Dovetail are the most powerful (but often underused) components of the system.And when you combine Rulemanager with Dovetail Carrier, it gets even more powerful.To demonstrate some of this power, I've created a collection of business rule recipes that will educate and inspire you to make the most of your business rules.There's over 30 business rule examples, and they stretch across a number of areas, including:User NotificationsWorkflow AutomationCustomer NotificationsIntegrating with third-party services/appsTask ManagerCalling external apps/scriptsSLA Rules (Service Level Agreement)Bonus!There's also a Business Rule Template, which is helpful when defining new business rules.It can be provided to business users, who can fill out the template and submit it to the technical staff.Get It!This Collection of Recipes and the Business Rule Template is completely free.Simply click the button below to get free access.Access the Business…

How To Customize the Clarify Rule Properties form to support function-based Rule Properties

January 11, 2017 Recently I discussed function-based rule properties, which allow you to add your own code for calculating a rule property value.I was asked last week about these – specifically, what if you’re using Dovetail Rulemanager, but not using Dovetail Agent. How do you define these properties? BackgroundThe property can be defined as a function using the Rule Property UI within Dovetail Agent.But if you’re not using Dovetail Agent, but you are using Dovetail Rulemanager, you can still take advantage of these.Rule properties are stored in table_prop_name. There is a new custom field named x_is_function that defines this property as a function. If set to 1, this property will be evaluated as a function. If set to 0 (default), it will not be.So you can simply create your rule property as normal, then you just need to set the x_is_function column to…