Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Now available: Dovetail Mobile 2.0

September 30, 2010 Dovetail Mobile Agent 2.0 is now available. New functionality in Dovetail Mobile Agent includes: Subcase Functionality (creating, editing, closing, workflow, logging of phone calls, emails and notes, searching, privileges, etc.) Password Reset, allowing a user to reset their own password, should it be lost or forgotten Searching of files and attachments (case attachments, solution attachments, etc.) using Dovetail Seeker 2.0 Application-level privilege, allowing administrators to control which users can use Dovetail Mobile Agent. Data Restriction, allowing different groups of users to only see certain data within the system Subcases Search for files and attachments Password Reset Documentation Dovetail Mobile Agent documentation is available online. Get it! To obtain this release, create a request using Dovetail SelfService, or send us an email.

Now available: Dovetail Seeker 2.0

Dovetail Seeker 2.0 Dovetail Seeker 2.0 is now available. A couple of previous blog posts gave some sneak peeks into the major enhancements. Rich Document Indexing We have added the ability to index and search the contents of rich documents such as Portable Document Format (PDF) or Microsoft Office documents. You can now index and search attachments (case attachments, solution attachments, etc.) You can also index and search files (that aren’t attachments), such as product documentation, whitepapers, etc. An example of searching attachments: An example of searching external documents: New Architecture Benefits We are now using a message oriented architecture for document indexing. This means that Dovetail Seeker is easier for us to maintain. Better yet it's performance has markedly improved. Another benefit is that you can now re-index individual dovetail or file specifications. In fact, modifying the document…

Information regarding the recent ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

September 21, 2010 Microsoft recently released a Security Advisory in regards to a vulnerability in ASP.NET. We take security seriously here at Dovetail Software and wanted to let you know how this affects your Dovetail Software products. Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP at Microsoft in charge of ASP.NET, has posted information regarding this issue, and some Frequently Asked Questions about it. He has recommended that customers immediately apply a workaround (described below) to prevent attackers from using this vulnerability against your ASP.NET applications. Dovetail Applications Affected: Dovetail Mobile Agent Dovetail Seeker This can also affect any custom ASP.NET applications that you’ve created, including those that use the Dovetail SDK. We are working on updated releases to these products and will notify our customers via our normal product release update channels when these releases are available. We are also emailing all of our customers who…

Dovetail information feeds

September 2, 2010 Did you know we provide a few different information feeds that help you stay informed with information about Dovetail? By subscribing to feeds, new information is delivered to you – which means you don’t have to go visiting lots of different web sites to see if there’s new content available. Blogs There’s a RSS feed for all the Dovetail bloggers, or you can subscribe to individual bloggers, if you so wish, by visiting their page and clicking the orange RSS icons in your browser or by clicking the RSS link. Some of us also allow for subscribing by email, in case you’re not an RSS kind of person. Product Releases There’s a feed for product releases – so you’ll know when new products are available – including new revisions of existing products. Knowledgebase There’s also a feed for new knowledgebase…

IIS Configuration and Permissions for remote file attachments

September 1, 2010 While setting up some advanced capabilities of DovetailAgent, we ran into some IIS/Windows permission issues. This post is to capture and share some of the learnings. To start with, Kevin Miller has a good post on installing Classic ASP web application on IIS7. The “advanced” capabilities I’m referring to was setting up file attachment uploads, and saving those files off to a permanent file storage area, accessed by a UNC drive such as \\fileServer\attachments Environment: Windows Server 2008, Dovetail Agent 4.3 File Uploads The way file uploads work is that the file is first uploaded to the web server where DovetailAgent is running. Then, the application moves the file to the permanent storage location, which is commonly a share on a different server. The application also creates directories and subdirectories where needed. So if your base attachment directory is\\fileServer\attachments,…

Dovetail is looking for a .NET Technical Lead

August 30, 2010 We're looking for a proven .NET technical lead for one of our product lines. You'll be working on a small team that develops applications for large businesses using some of the latest technology. You will work closely with the VP of Products, and will be involved in all aspects of solution development, including analysis, design, development, testing, documentation, and support. Expectations include software design, system architecture, process improvement mentor to other team members technical leader on product architecture and quality validate complete product and system testing partnering with other team members to share learnings, create and educate on best practices, and improve the overall efficiency and productivity of the development organization Participation in the community (blogger, attendance of events, avid blog reader + commenter, etc.) will put you firmly in the running for this position. We’re looking for people that…

Initial Response

August 26, 2010 When working cases in Clarify / Dovetail, an option available to agents is Initial Response. Initial Response allows an agent to mark that the initial response to a customer has occurred. True to its name, an Initial Response can only occur once in the history of a case. This Initial Response operation can be performed on either the Log Phone call or Log Email forms. Initial Response button in the User Interfaces Phone Log form in the Clarify Classic Client: Email Log form in the Clarify Classic Client: Phone Log form in DovetailAgent: Email Log form in DovetailAgent: Activity Log When the Initial Response action occurs, it is logged to the case activity log: Time Bomb When the Initial Response action occurs, a time bomb is created. Once we…

Segregating your data using Data Restriction

August 23, 2010 The Dovetail SDK (fcSDK) includes Data Restriction Technology.Data Restriction allows you to segregate your Clarify/Dovetail database so that different sets of users can use the same forms (and customizations), yet see different sets of data from the database. This can include any items such as cases, sites, contacts, parts, etc. For example, suppose you have two different groups that support different product lines. You might set up Data Restriction so that the users in group 1 can only see group 1's sites, contacts, solutions, cases, and parts. Likewise, group 2 would only see their data. The user’s do not even know that they are not seeing all of the data from the database. Data Restriction based on Geography A common data restriction setup is to segregate data via geography. For example, users in Europe may only see data (cases, contacts, sites,…

Closing (and reopening) a solution

August 18, 2010 A not-so-uncommon request I’ve heard over the years is the need to be able to close a solution. You can close a case, close an action item, close an opportunity – but you can’t close a solution in the out-of-the-box product. But this is a pretty easy customization – so lets walk through it. Why close a solution? Knowledge can become outdated. But we may want to retain that knowledge, especially when we’ve linked these solutions to cases or change requests. By closing it, we can mark it as no longer relevant, and closing will also remove it from a user’s wipbin and all queues. Status and Condition Most workflow objects have a status and a condition. We can use a similar mechanism here. We’ll use the Open and Closed Conditions (same as for a case). I create a…

Linking Solutions / Cases / Change Requests

August 17, 2010 One of the features available within a Clarify / Dovetail system is the ability to “link” cases to solutions. What this essentially means is that we’ve noted the particular solution that solved the case at hand. For example, if we have a case titled “How do I configure VPN on Windows 7?”, and we have a solution that answers this question, then we can link the case to that solution. In database terms, it simply means we’ve related or joined the case to the solution. Well, technically, a solution can has one (problem) description and can have many workarounds, so we’re actually relating the case to one of the workarounds, but don’t worry about that for now. Just think of relating the case to the solution. Obviously, having re-useable knowledge is beneficial to an organization. We can…

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