Author: Dovetail for Clarify

Posts by Dovetail for Clarify:

Clarify Rule Manager: The Final Answer

October 16, 2007 Clarify Rule Manager, and Dovetail RuleManager, are the all-important modules that manage the business rules such as when to escalate an open case to the next level of response. Being able to work with Rule Manager is crucial of course, and questions arise from time to time. One conversation about Rule Manager and Time Bombs in the ITtoolbox forums lasted for six years. Started in August 2000 with a question about time bomb errors, the thread finally ended (or so it seems) last year, when Dovetail Software, experts in the Clarify install, supplied the last word. “When a rule changes via the Clarify classic client, Clarify creates a timebomb with the title of the rule and the flag of 131076 (0×20004). No other information on the timebomb are relevant (relations are all null, the times are the zero time, etc.).…

Amdocs Clarify Dashboard Tutorial

September 6, 2007 How does the user of the Amdocs Clarify CRM system derive real-time situation analysis – business intelligence for Clarify – in easy-to-use dashboard views of the Clarify data? One simple answer is Dovetail Software’s RuleManager – a drop-in replacement for the Amdocs Rulemanager product – as detailed in the following example. We’ve been discussing business intelligence for the last few days, the need to integrate data, and the need to present business users with very simple tools. In the background, Dovetail’s own Gary Sherman has written an extensive tutorial showing precisely how to: write business rules to reflect real situations; query the Clarify database for current situations; export the retrieved data as XML; and display them in color-coded graphics in the form of dashboard gauges. The result is an attractive graphic display, understandable at a glance, showing real-time business intelligence – in this…

The Future of Amdocs Clarify

June 8, 2007 How does the future look for the owner of the Amdocs Clarify CRM system? When Amdocs acquired Clarify, it led the way in combining its specialization in billing with CRM. This was an exciting story for the industry as a whole, sparking more acquisitions, and fueling general interest in the broader integration of departments. The story since then has been a mixed one for Amdocs customers, although the surge in CRM has led to some new integration possibilities. The upgrade path for the once-pioneering Clarify system under Amdocs has had a tortuous history, with no progression outside of the proprietary Clarify codebase, and with Amdocs moving awkwardly into thin-client experimentation. Lately the company has been developing open frameworks. Even within the main Amdocs constituency of telecommunications, some Clarify owners have looked outside of Amdocs for help, notably with the Dovetail Software enhancements. Amdocs remains…

Happy To Be Of Service

May 25, 2007 The current IT and software development world is very much concerned with services, and service oriented architecture. This is a world well suited for Dovetail Software, we were service oriented from the beginning. We started life exposing Clarify processes in APIs, and these have evolved today into Web services as well. Our purpose was always to provide extensibility to the Clarify install. It was a more elaborate procedure in earlier years. “SEC.NET also supports “API invoke mode”, which allows any of the hundreds of available high level APIs from the Dovetail SDK to be invoked. This was originally written to allow systems to send email for integration purposes [...] This capability was built years ago, before the prevalence of SOA architectures. Modern systems will typically just call anAPI directly, or even make a WebService call, as opposed to invoking an API over email (basically, RPC over email).” – Email…

Knowledge in Motion

May 15, 2007 Knowledge only works when it’s in motion – being consumed, or expressed, or else being analyzed, sorted and ordered. The data components of knowledge arise out of motion, and are captured by information systems. The greatest technical challenge for the development of enterprise-wide knowledge management lies with integration of legacy systems and newer information tools. Key tools in this effort are ETL products. ETL (extract, transform and load) refers to the extraction of data from active systems, classically for importation into a data warehouse for cleansing and (re)processing, but generally for any reason, such as a mashup or entry into another application for further recalculation on the fly. “the reality of BI for most enterprises is far murkier, with massive investments in technology for data warehousing, data integration, and analytics, but payoffs that are sparse or hard to calculate. What’s needed, experts agree,…

The Troubled Future of IT

April 27, 2007 Gartner at its annual Symposium/ITxpo this week in San Francisco has presented a number of messages to the IT profession, with few holds barred. Gartner analyst Steve Prentice said it most bluntly: “Now is not the time for complacency or mediocrity [...] This industry is in danger of becoming one of failure. We’ve come to accept mediocrity as the norm. It’s not a lack of technology or skills. The problem comes down to a lack of vision.” This message as reported by Larry Dignan says that technology managers are essentially paralyzed, waiting for software vendors to roll out the next upgrade, and no longer capable of leading their company’s development future innovatively. “Technology managers are mired in mediocrity, wait for technology vendors to innovate and fear being a first mover. The result: The U.S. doesn’t innovate and CIOs risk…

Two Key CRM Problems – Adoption and Expectations

April 23, 2007 After a decade of development, CRM deployments are still problematic for many companies, as recent surveys show. Two main areas of concern are employee adoption of new deployments, and also large disparities between what executives expect and what the system actually delivers. Additionally, sales consultancy CSO Insights finds installation problems, with forty-one percent of implementations going over budget. The main reasons for budget overruns center around management failure to plan for user training and post-install support. This melds with the adoption rates being lower than expected. CSO explains: ”’I’m sure we could pick out companies whose numbers are well above average, and I think we would find those companies have had CRM [programs] for some time,’ Trailer said. ‘But I would suspect the difference is not their CRM[technology] but their management. CRM isn’t what makes the difference; people embracing the tools makes the difference.’” See CRM software fails sales This is…

Dovetail Web Services and Clarify

April 13, 2007 The future of software is star-studded with web services. We discuss them frequently here, whether in the context of on-demand or on-premise deployments. The principles of a service oriented architecture, which include looser coupling between services that are reusable at will by numerous applications across the system, open up the experiences and capabilities of workers throughout the enterprise. Dovetail Software’s own products in the CRM and support fields include Dovetail Web Services. These are an evolution from the APIs that made us famous for extending the capacity of the Amdocs Clarify database. Dovetail web services and APIs allow the Clarify owner to add Clarify functions to any program or web page in any environment. This delivers savings in costs as well as the obvious increased capabilities. Web services enable integration between different applications, such as by embedding Clarify workflow functions (retrieving…

Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database (and Rest of World)

February 27, 2007 Those who have called Daylight Savings Time a folly from the beginning may snicker at the Congressional decision to alter the dates, but those who have anything to do with software aren’t laughing. Changing the dates of the Daylight Savings Time active period, for the first time in decades, will throw a lot of clocks out of sync. Dovetail engineer Steven Weintraub has compiled a list of dates affected by the new law, and instructions to update Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Clarify database “This requires a good knowledge of CLARIFY database setup and SQL. This is a problem. I am sure Clarify is providing a solution for those using Clarify support – but this does not help the many customers who have stopped paying support. “For those customers (and this blog post is for you) – they have to…

CRM Thrives on Open Standards

February 1, 2007 Through all of its evolution, Dovetail Software’s family of CRM products has embraced open standards in the process of bringing extensibility to Clarify’s proprietary code. Open-standard scripting languages such as JavaScript simplify and energize extension and integration throughout the enterprise computing environment. These languages are readily recognized by many applications, and freely employed by in-house IT departments. Standards sometimes arise first, often from a single developer or project, and afterwards get the seal of approval of a trusted authority that enables all developers to embrace the technology. This happened with JavaScript, created initially by Netscape. The same thing is happening now with Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) specification, which it is currently offering for ISO standardization. Other times, standards have to be created. This is occurring now in the CRM environment as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) continues its evolution: suggested standards begin to be discussed, and standards already accepted are…

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