REQUEST A DEMO

Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
About:

Subscribe to Gary Sherman's RSS feed and never miss a post.

Posts by Gary Sherman:

No one said CRM was easy.

August 2, 2011 Michael Moaz over at Gartner recently penned an interesting article: We failed at CRM. Now let’s try Social CRM – it’s even harder. A few quotes form his article stood out to me. One of the woman on the panel compared a CRM program to childbirth: “I thought once a child is born, the hard part is over! Boy was I mistaken!” Completely agree. I've been working in CRM since the mid 90's, and one thing is always clear: your systems need to keep evolving. Your business changes. Technology changes. Customer demands and expectations change. Your systems need to change as well. Much of the work we've been doing here at Dovetail over the last 5 years is helping organizations update their CRM systems. Companies poured millions into their CRM systems early on, then left them alone for years, and…

Webinar: Clarify / Dovetail Schema 201

August 1, 2011 In this complimentary webinar, we'll build on the previous Schema 101 session, and dive into more advanced schema topics. We had a great turnout in the first session, and a lot of requests for part 2. Topics SQL Views Many-To-Many Tables Role Objects Pseudo Relations Exclusive Relations Change Fields Closer look at the ADP tables Those are the topics I have planned to cover. If there’s anything else you’d be interested in, please let me know, and I’ll see what I can do. When Wednesday, August 24, 2011 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Central Time) Register Register at: https://dovetailsoftwareevents.webex.com/dovetailsoftwareevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=669502491

Wait – what’s my password again? Password reset functionality

July 18, 2011 Pretty much every web application out there has the functionality that allows a user to reset their password if it gets lost or forgotten. It’s easy. It’s automatic. It removes the burden of a sys admin having to do this manually. It’s all good. So why isn’t this a standard feature of enterprise applications? It always annoyed me that this wasn’t part of the Clarify Classic Client baseline functionality. Regardless of the answer – this functionality is available in our Dovetail web applications for Clarify. It’s actually been in Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Mobile, and Dovetail AgentLite for a while now. But since I know not everyone is aware of it, I figured I’d do a quick walkthrough of it. It pretty much works like you expect. Forgot your password? The login page contains a Forgot your password link: Which takes…

Include a URL to the case in outgoing emails

July 14, 2011 I’ve blogged in the past about how to customize your outgoing emails in Clarify/Dovetail, including using rule properties. Using this same technique, we can include a URL back to the case automatically. For example, if you’re using a SelfService type application, such as Dovetail SelfService, or Clarify eSupport or WebSupport, we can include a URL back to the case so customers can easily get back to the case, where they can review it, add notes, view the status, etc.  1. Export the existing Template form the database You’ll need a directive file for the template. Here’s one: http://www.clarifytoolbox.com/code/directive-file-sendemailaboutobj-comtmplte Export it using ArchiveManager (DIET) or dataex: diet -user_name USERNAME -password PASSWORD -db_server SERVER -db_name DATABASE -archive -export sendemailaboutobj.dat -dir email_com_template.dir 2. Edit the Template All we need to do is modify the template, include the URL that we want, and use…

SDK based web apps in a 64-bit environment

June 17, 2011 I wanted to drop a little update regarding some upcoming changes, specifically in regards to our classic web applications (Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Admin, and Dovetail SelfService) operating in a 64-bit environment.   If you’re not running one of those web apps in a 64-bit environment, then don’t sweat this post – head off and read something more interesting :) Currently, we require our classic web apps to run in a 32-bit mode. Why? Because the Dovetail SDK is currently 32-bit only but that will change with SDK version 3.0.   Update: 3/28/2012:   Now that Dovetail SDK 3.0 has been released (which supports both 32 and 64-bit COM objects), I wanted to drop a little update here.   Dovetail Agent 4.5 can now be run in 64-bit mode. This requires the 64-bit version of SDK (version 3.0 or higher) be installed.   Dovetail Admin (any version) can…

Open positions at Dovetail

June 14, 2011 We now have a number of open positions here at Dovetail, including:   Senior .NET Technical Lead Front End Developer Senior QA Lead   Details of all open positions are listed on our website.   Email us and tell us why you’d make a great addition to our team: tech-jobs@dovetailsoftware.com.

Multiple email addresses for a contact or employee

June 10, 2011 In today’s modern age, many people have multiple email addresses. They may have a work email, a home email, a personal email, etc. I think I may have at least 1/2 a dozen.   In Clarify (and Dovetail), there’s one field for specifying an email address. Back in 1990, it was uncommon that people had multiple email addresses, so a single field was sufficient.   But what do we do when a contact has multiple email addresses? Where do we store that info?   I’ve seen systems where multiple custom fields are created, such as: table_contact.x_home_email table_contact.x_work_email table_contact.x_alternate_email table_contact.x_alternate_email2   etc.   Yuck.   I’ve also seen systems where multiple email addresses are crammed into the one existing email field.   Yuck again. How about…   I think what would be useful is a table that allowed for many email…

Everyone play nice: BOLT, OLEDB, Oracle, 64-bit Windows

May 27, 2011 With 64-bit machines becoming more and more prevalent, we’ve seen some confusion popup around installing and using applications. Is the app 32-bit? 64-bit? which database provider do I use? Is my web app 32 or 64 bit? etc. It’s confusing. No doubt. tl; dr Short answer:  If you’re on a 64-bit machine, and using Oracle, use the 64-bit Oracle provider for OLE DB for BOLT. 64-bit Windows explained There’s a great post from last year that “explains 64 bit”: Programs are still in the same place, in %ProgramFiles%, unless you need the 32 bit version, which is in %ProgramFiles(x86)%, except on a 32 bit machine, where it’s still %ProgramFiles%. All those dll’s are still in %SystemRoot%System32, just now they’re 64 bit. The 32 bit ones, they’re in %SystemRoot%SysWOW64. You’re with me so far, right? Oh, and the 16 bit ones…

Credit Card Authorization via Clearbasic

I was recently asked if we could tie into a credit card authorization service from the Clarify Classic Client.   The particular service in question was Authorize.net, which allows merchants to accept credit card payments.   What’s nice about Authorize is that they expose web APIs that can be called via HTTP. Their developer site is pretty good – with lots of different options, and sample code in a variety of languages.   I’ve blogged in the past about making web requests and consuming result sets, so the approach here is similar – although in this instance it’s even easier. The results from Authorize are just a delimited string, which is much easier to parse in ClearBasic than JSON. Giddy Up   I signed up for a test account, grabbed some sample code from their site, and ported it to ClearBasic.   The API is pretty much what you expect…

How much disk space do I need for Seeker indexes?

May 25, 2011   As we continue to roll out new instances of the Dovetail Seeker search engine to our customers, one question that frequently arises is: How much disk space do I need for the Dovetail Seeker indexes? A little background   Dovetail Seeker contains two major components: indexing and searching. Before you can search for your data, you need to index it.   An index is a collection of searchable data organized into documents, each having many fields of information. Every document in the index is a potential search result with each document's field potentially containing one or more searchable terms.   For example, you will likely wish to search for cases. For each case in the system, the indexing application will add adocument to the index containing details about that case. The document will contain at least an id, title, and case summary. Once…