Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Posts by Gary Sherman:

Using the URL Rewrite module to set your cookies to HttpOnly

January 20, 2011 A question recently arose about how to set a cookie to be HttpOnly. An HttpOnly cookie is one that cannot be accessed through client-side script. Any information contained in an HTTP-only cookie is less likely to be disclosed to a hacker or a malicious Web site. The use of HTTP-only cookies is one of several techniques that, when used together, can mitigate the risk of cross-site scripting. Setting a cookie to be HttpOnly One way to set a cookie to be HttpOnly is to change how you define it. Rather than something like this: Response.Cookies("mycookie") = “foo”; We can do this: Response.AddHeader "Set-Cookie", "mycookie=foo; HttpOnly" Pretty simple. What about cookies you don’t create yourself? This works great for cookies that you create yourself. But what about those that are created by IIS and ASP, such as the ASPSESSION cookie? One…

Some recent SelfService changes

January 19, 2011 In addition to our recently updated corporate website, we also updated our customer SelfService portal. I wanted to comment on a few changes that were made as part of that. Ditching the Case Type One of things we eliminated was the case type. When customers create a new case, they no longer have to choose a case type. And the case type isn’t shown on the view case page. We do have (and use) different case types, including Problem, Question, Help Desk, Sales, Support Renewal, and a bunch more. However, when it comes to a technical support issue submitted from our customers – we don’t treat those cases any differently depending on the case type that the customer picked. Whether the customer picks Problem, Question, or Help Desk – it doesn’t matter to us. We don’t do any different work,…

Complimentary Webinar – Contemporary Search for Clarify / Dovetail Systems

January 18, 2011 For years, organizations have been filling their CRM system with information. A common challenge is finding this valuable information within. In this webinar, we’ll cover traditional approaches to search (including the challenges of these approaches), and then we’ll look closely at use of a more contemporary search solution, including non-traditional ways to use search within a Clarify / Dovetail system. Topics Search usage Search Technologies – Traditional and Contemporary Use of search in different applications Search as part of workflow Architecture Extensibility Demonstrations When Wednesday, February 2, 2011 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Central Time) Register Register at: https://dovetailsoftwareevents.webex.com/dovetailsoftwareevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=661099603 Call for Ideas Have something specific you’d like to hear or discuss in the Search webinar? Let’s hear it! Have an idea for a topic for a future session? Please share! We'd love to hear your ideas. Interested in presenting,…

User-Defined List (Hgbst) utility

January 12, 2011 A common source of bad or corrupt data in an Amdocs/Clarify system is in the area of User-Defined lists. It’s not uncommon to find issues such as: orphaned elements duplicate elements a level referencing a non-existing element a level referencing a non-existing parent level lists that don’t have a root level elements linked to multiple levels or multiple lists lists with a loop in the element/show hierarchy etc. Many of these issues can be identified using the Data Verifier utility that is included as part of the Dovetail SDK. However, when the data is really bad, other tools may be useful. How does data get this way? The most common way that I’ve seen data end up in this state is by developers incorrectly trying to add/update user-defined list data programmatically. The data model for this data is confusing. Very…

Clarify Form Identifier (Or, What the heck Clarify form is that?)

January 6, 2011 On occasion, while working in the Clarify Classic Client (especially in a customer’s customized environment), I come across a form that I’m not familiar with (might even be a custom form) that I need to dive into the details of. Trying to find this form in UI Editor is not always easy. It’s common that the form name and/or title aren’t very descriptive (this even happens on baseline forms). So I typically have to start the Clarify client with some debugging and tracing switches, and examine the log file to try and find its form ID. This works, but I think there should be an easier way. An approach from the past One approach I’ve seen done in the past is to create a custom help file (CHM) that contains the form IDs. Then pressing F1 on a…

Auto-closing a case workflow

A colleague asked me recently about an email he had received from the support department of one of our vendors. It looked something like: Hello, Anne Teak, A few days ago, our support staff has replied your inquiry at: http://www.some.vendor.com/helpdesk/view-thread.aspx?thread=735746 Since then, we have not received any response back from you, and would like to know if you consider this issue to be closed. If you have any further questions, please use the link above to post them. This issue will be automatically closed out in a few days if you choose not to respond. To access this discussion thread, navigate to the following link: http://www.some.vendor.com/helpdesk/view-thread.aspx?thread=735746 Sincerely yours, Some.Vendor Team The gist of the process is that if a customer hasn’t responded after a certain period of time, then we…

Use rule properties in your outgoing emails

November 18, 2010 Did you know you can use rule properties in your outgoing emails (log emails)? I was recently asked this question, and I thought the answer was yes, but I wasn’t positive, so I decided to test it out (and of course document it here). Since you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out that the answer is Yes. In this particular scenario, I simply wanted to include the case title in the email subject. By default, the subject of the email is Regarding Case Number XXX (where XXX is the case id number). Lets create a better email subject. A little reminder before we get going – we’re talking about Log Emails that are actually sent out via RuleManager. No surprise, for my testing and usage, I’m using Dovetail RuleManager. The send_email_about_obj template When sending an email out, the send_email_about_obj…

Log Email using your mail application (such as Outlook)

October 11, 2010 A while ago I posted about using email with Dovetail/Clarify. One of the items I talked about is the Enhanced Email Out functionality within Dovetail Agent, which is a client-side integration with your MS Outlook client. This allows users to access their address books, attach files to the outgoing email, use your signature, read/delivery receipts, etc. The way this is accomplished in via Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), a Microsoft library that exposes the interfaces of the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI). There area few downsides of using CDO, including the need to install CDO on each desktop, Outlook warnings/restrictions, and troubles with Office 2010. It’s not really a surprise – having a web application be able to access your Outlook application has the potential for security trouble. Use your mail client An alternative to this is to simply pop open a…

ASP.NET Security Fix Now on Windows Update

October 5, 2010 I had recently blogged about a security vulnerability in ASP.NET. Microsoft has released a security fix for this issue that is available through Windows Update. Details and frequently asked questions are available. Please make sure to install these updates as soon as possible on your servers.

Calling SOAP web services from cbbatch on UNIX using an Oracle procedure

October 4, 2010 Yes, you read that right - calling SOAP web services from cbbatch on UNIX using an Oracle stored procedure. Even reading that kind of makes my head hurt. But, when you're between a rock and a hard place, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I've been working with a customer recently who has created some web services using .NET and our Dovetail SDK. He needs to able to call these web services synchronously from ClearBasic code, both from the Clarify Classic Client (running on Windows) and from cbbatch (running on UNIX). Calling web services from the Clarify Classic Client Calling web services from the Clarify Classic Client is pretty straightforward. Since we're on Windows, we can use COM and ActiveX objects to do so. A few examples of this: Using the microsoft.XmlHttp object Using the Microsoft SOAP toolkit…

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