Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Clarify IT Toolbox group being deactivated?

February 24, 2015 I received an email today from IT Toolbox: Based on recent member feedback, the following groups will be deactivated:ACT!ClarifySalesLogixYou are currently a member of one or more of these groups. You can ask or reply to new threads in CRM - General Discussions. I’m definitely saddened by this – I’ve shared a lot of information there, and learned a lot as well. We’ll see how the Clarify community takes to the CRM - General Discussions list instead. I’m guessing that it’s due to the lack of activity on the Clarify list. Looking at the number of messages per month, the decline is pretty obvious. Quite the decline from its heyday in the early 2000s. My first post to that group was back in January of 2001. Over 14 years ago – crazy! What about the archives? I sent an email…

Smarter Pickers

Throughout our application, we use “pickers” for selecting items. For example, we use a picker for queues when dispatching a case: a picker for contacts when creating a case: and a picker for the installed part on a case: For a small list of items (lets say < 100), such as a list of queues, we’ll just show the user all of the available items straight-away. The user can scroll to see them all, or start typing and the list will be filtered in place. When there are a large number of items, such as a list of contacts when creating a case, which can be thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions, we make the user type to start the search process. There’s no way we could retrieve millions of contacts from the database and show them to the…

More Case History enhancements in Dovetail Agent

February 17, 2015 Last spring I posted about some of the enhancements we’ve made to the case history in Dovetail Agent. Over the last few releases, we’ve also made more improvements that we think make it even better. Images File attachments that are images are now shown inline. They’re constrained to a maximum size, to maintain readability. Clicking on an image opens it in a lightbox, and in a larger format when necessary. Example: Ordering In my previous post, I mentioned that we displayed the case history in reverse chronological order – with the newest entries at the top, similar to many current social apps (facebook, twitter, etc.). Based on customer feedback, we added an additional option here. Users can now choose the order – either chronological or reverse chronological. And the user’s preference is automatically remembered. This gives each user more control…

Solutions go from boring to kick-ass

February 12, 2015 One of the common complaints with knowledgebase articles (solutions) in Clarify was the fact that they are plain text – even on the web. We’ve recently enhanced solutions so that they are much more robust and useful. Solutions can now contain rich text, images, and videos. Apps This functionality is supported within Dovetail Agent and in Dovetail SelfService. Dovetail Agent: Dovetail SelfService: Examples Here’s a few examples of solutions from our knowledgebase: https://support.dovetailsoftware.com/selfservice/solutions/show/700 https://support.dovetailsoftware.com/selfservice/solutions/show/638 https://support.dovetailsoftware.com/selfservice/solutions/show/721 Rich Text Solutions now support rich text, including: Headers (heading 1 –> heading 6) Italic Bold Superscript Subscript Highlighted text Strikethrough Unordered Lists Ordered Lists HTML links Blockquotes Inline code Task lists Tables Code blocks, including syntax highlighting Typographic replacements – such as © Images As nice as text is, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially in a knowledgebase context. So solutions…

Broadcasts in Dovetail Agent

February 5, 2015 One of the newer features in Dovetail Agent is broadcasts. A broadcast is used to communicate a message to all users. Broadcasts appear in the user's notification drawer - along with Notifier messages (such as from business rules). Notice the megaphone icon which helps identify it as a broadcast. Examples What are a few examples of where you might use broadcasts? The system will be going down tonight at 5:00 PM for maintenance. If a customer calls about the special holiday promotion, here's what you need to know. This app has been updated to a new version. Outgoing shipments will be delayed because of the snow storm. Or whatever other message you want to send to your users. Properties Broadcast messages are made up of: Title - a brief summary of the message, similar to an email subject Message body…

Notifications in Dovetail Agent

February 2, 2015 When a business rule fires, most of the time the result is a notification to one or more users. There's a few common ways a user can get notified - email, pager, sms/text messages, and the "notifier". Notifier means that the user gets a notification within the application itself. In the Clarify Classic Client, there is a Notifier form (Desktop - Notifier) where messages are displayed. Notify Server On the back end, Clarify uses a Notifier service/daemon, commonly referred to as the Notify Server. The Clarify Client communicates with the Notifier service using a Windows socket connection. This is notoriously buggy. It wouldn't always connect, the connection would drop, messages would get lost, etc. Often, the Notifier service would think it delivered a message to the client, and then delete the message from the database. If it didn't actually get…

ThrowbackThursday: First Choice Giveaway – Clarify User Group 1998

January 29, 2015 Stumbled across a copy of a disk that we (when we were First Choice Software) gave away at the 1998 Clarify User Group. No idea what’s on it, as I don’t have a 3.5” disk drive kicking around anymore. In case you kids have no idea what the hell that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#3.C2.BD-inch_floppy_disk Pretty cool that we’ve been giving away free software to the Clarify community for close to two decades now.

Commitment Templates

January 28, 2015 In our last episode, we looked at Commitments in Dovetail Agent. When a commitment expires, or is about to expire, the system will notify the user. Rulemanager is what sends out the notification, and the content of the notification message is defined by the commitment templates. Lets take a look at these templates, and see how we can make them better. Templates There are two templates in the system that are used for commitments: Commitment and Warning. These are stored in table_com_tmplte. With the commitment enhancements that we’ve made to Dovetail Agent, we can also enhance the commitment templates to provide more information and context. Commitment Template Here’s the commitment template we provide with Dovetail Agent. They’re simply DAT files that you import using dataex or DIET. The interesting part of the template is really the action field: RE: Commitment…

Commitments in Dovetail Agent

January 26, 2015 Like a lot of the work we do here at Dovetail, we try to deliver newer, cooler, better software, while still maintaining compatibility with Clarify as much as we can. The commitments functionality in Dovetail Agent is a good example of this. What is a commitment? From the Clarify docs: A commitment is a promise to perform some action by a certain time, such as a promise to call back a customer with a progress update. To keep track of this promise, you can make a commitment. Some folks call them reminders, or ticklers. New Commitments Lets compare the new commitment form in Clarify vs. in Dovetail: Notice a couple of things: We’ve simplified it down to just the core fields- title, due date, warning (reminder) and notes. We default the due date to be now + 24 hours…

Dovetail Agent: Hello Tags, Goodbye WIPbins

January 23, 2015 Within Dovetail Agent, we’ve replaced WIPbins with tags. I wanted to explain a bit of the difference, and some of the reasons why we did so.What’s a WIPbin?Your WIPbins (Work In Process bins) contain the objects on which you have agreed to work (that is, objects you have accepted from a queue) or that have been assigned to you.Think of WIPbins like folders that can be used to organize your work.What’s a tag?Wikipedia says:In information systems, a tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system.Tagging an objectTagging…

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