Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Business Rule: Notifications on customer activities

October 25, 2013 I’ve posted in the past about how to notify the case owner when someone else logs a note to their case. I find this especially useful when a customer does something in SelfService, or responds to an email that is processed by Dovetail Carrier. For example, if a customer logs a note to a case in SelfService, I want to know. If a customer responds to an email, and is automatically logged to a case (via Dovatail Carrier), I want to know. This post recaps information in the previous post, and adds some additional niceties to the notification message. Notification Email Here’s an example of a notification received via email: The business rule Object Type: CaseRule Name/Description: Notify the owner when someone else logs a note to their caseStart Events: Log Note, Close Task, Phone Log, Log Email, Email…

How To: Close a case when all of its subcases are closed

August 5, 2013 I got a question today about how to close a case when all of its subcases are closed. You could certainly add code to your application (such as the Clarify Client or Dovetail Agent), but to me, this sounds like more workflow automation, and we can do that with business rules. Plus, if you use multiple client applications (lets say the Clarify Client and Dovetail Mobile) – you don’t want to have to customize each of those apps. To accomplish this task, we’ll create a business rule that fires when a subcase is closed. If all of its sibling subcases are also closed, then we can close the case. First wrinkle: How do we know when all of a subcase’s siblings are also closed? One way to do it is to look at all of…

SchemaEditor improvements when dropping columns on Oracle

July 8, 2013 I’ve been recently working with a couple of customers who were dropping database columns from their schema on Oracle, and the drops were taking a long time to complete. In one instance, the customer estimated it would take 50 hours to drop a bunch of columns from their contact table. In another, a customer observed that dropping two columns from table_site_part took over two hours. Dropping 3 columns from table_contact took over 1 hour. These long execution times can disrupt normal operations – especially those environments with limited maintenance windows. Dovetail’s schema editing tool (Schema Editor) and Amdocs schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager) all do the same basic operations when it comes to dropping columns. Basically they all do this: ALTER TABLE table_name DROP COLUMN column_name; There’s a better way. Set Unused On large tables the process of physically…

Optimized Views

May 31, 2013 Within your Clarify / Dovetail schema, there’s a concept of an Optimized View. This is really an implicit feature of a view, but if you’re aware of it, and understand how they work, you can use it to your advantage. An optimized view happens when you have a join to a table, but the only field that you’re including from the joined in table is the objid field, and the relation type from the main table to the joined table is a OTOP or MTO. When these conditions are met, then the schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will optimize the underlying view, meaning that it will not actually create a join to the table, but instead will simply use the column from the main table as part of the select clause. That’s a bunch of info…

A Rapportive raplet for bringing Dovetail info into Gmail

May 29, 2013 A few months ago, I demonstrated using a custom raplet with Rapportive and Gmail to bring Clarify / Dovetail information into the context of your email. As I mentioned, I initially hacked together some code as a proof-of-concept. I’ve cleaned up the code a bit, and have made it available on Github: https://github.com/gsherman/raplet The code is freely available, although it does use the Dovetail SDK, so you do need an SDK license key. I totally dig this integration. It’s not uncommon that I exchange emails directly with customers, and having additional case information right there in context is pretty sweet. Hope you find this useful. Rock on.

Deletes (Drops) in SchemaEditor

May 3, 2013 While discussing Dovetail SchemaEditor recently, a question came up around deletes (drops), i.e. How do you delete a column using SchemaEditor, as it doesn’t seem like SchemaScript supports deletes. First, a little background. SchemaEditor works with Data Dictionary files and with SchemaScript files. A Data Dictionary file is a complete reference of the database schema. This is similar to a Clarify complete schema files. SchemaScript is a simple, imperative way of specifying the changes to be made to the database schema. A complete schema file (Data Dictionary), because of its size and complexity, can quickly become unwieldy and cumbersome to work with. Schema Script simplifies the process of schema changes by allowing a user to specify only the changes to be made, as opposed to the complete schema. However, only adds and updates can be performed using SchemaScript. Deletes are not currently supported. …

awesome CSS Specificity cheat sheet

February 4, 2013 Over the weekend I attended the HTML5.TX conference here in Austin, along with an awesome CSS workshop byEstelle Weyl. It was a great conference and workshop. Austin is such a great community for technology. Every time I think I got a handle on CSS, I learn some new stuff that blows my mind, both practical tips and fun stuff. For a bit of CSS fun, check out her Gangham style done with CSS sprite animations. One of the helpful things that Estelle shared was her CSS SpeciFISHity cheat sheet, which helps explain CSS specificity. Download the PDF. Hopefully you’ll find this as useful as I did.

Job Opportunities – here and there

January 28, 2013 A couple of job opportunities to share. Front End Web Developer here at Dovetail We’re looking for an experienced front end web developer to join our team. HTML/CSS and heavy JavaScript. What you bring to the table: You write JavaScript from scratch and have written your own JavaScript library because it’s fun If you aren’t working with HTML5 and CSS3 you feel like you are working on legacy applications You love client-side MVC frameworks such as Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Underscore.js, etc. (we do!) When you go out to eat at a restaurant, you wonder why the menu isn’t presented in JSON You understand cross browser compatibility and testing in your development process You thrive in a fast paced work environment and get a rush from releasing a new build You contribute to the open source/technical community and…

You got Dovetail in my Gmail!

December 13, 2012 If you use Gmail, you may have heard of Rapportive. It’s a plugin that brings in social information into the context of an email. For example, when I’m looking at email from from my buddy Kevin, the sidebar fills in with contextual information, like so: Now I can quickly see his avatar, recent tweets, see where he’s located, job titles, get to his Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, etc. This is nice when emailing with people I know. It’s even nicer when I get emails from people I don’t know (or don’t know well), as it brings in much more contextual information. You can also hover over any email address and have the relevant info show up. Really powerful stuff. If you use Gmail, I highly recommend Rapportive. Raplets What’s even better is that they’ve opened up…

Authentication across applications, including Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite

December 11, 2012 We’ve worked with a couple of customers recently who use some other application for authentication. Basically, Single Sign-On. One was using CA SiteMinder, and another had a home grown application. In both instances, we were able to easily allow Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite to work with their existing authentication mechanisms, allowing single sign-on capabilities. This means that if a user has already authenticated in their environment, then they were automatically logged into Dovetail, without having to enter their username and password again. Pretty nice user experience. In this post, I’ll share some of the details about how this all works. For this scenario, our customer had a home grown “App Store”. Users logged into this App Store, which authenticates them, and then shows them a list of applications that they are authorized to use. One of them is Dovetail Mobile. …

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