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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
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Dovetail / Clarify Happy Hour : Massachusetts Edition

December 7, 2009 While I’m in Massachusetts next week, we’re sponsoring a get-together for our Dovetail and Clarify friends. Wednesday, December 16th from 5:30 - 8:00 at John Harvard's Brewpub in Framingham, MA. Drinks and appetizers are on us. It’s an informal evening, talking Dovetail and Clarify, technology, and meeting like-minded people, all while sharing a few pints. RSVP to the event through meetup.com: http://www.meetup.com/DovetailHappyHour/ Looking forward to seeing you there!   Click here to check out The Dovetail / Clarify Happy Hour Meetup!

Industry Insight: Social media

November 5, 2009 The impact of social media on business has far reaching effects and in all directions. Consumers around the globe share their opinions about products with anyone, anywhere. The popular digital playground Twitter recognized the impact of digital media on the marketplace so much that they now offer a vehicle for companies to see what consumers say about their products. This trend is not going to recede, but broaden and expand.How does the influence of social media guide and direct the customer service and support industry? Are there ways to mitigate damaging “tweets”? How about capitalize on positive blog posts?We'd love to hear what you think, so leave a comment below. 

A week of Monospace and Innotech

November 2, 2009 I spent last week at the Monospace conference, which was held concurrently with the annual Innotech conference here in Austin. Monospace This was the first year for Monospace, and it was fantastic. Scott Bellware did a great job of organizing the conf, bringing in top notch attendees, and providing fun after-hours activities as well. Miguel de Icaza (founder of the Mono project) attended, along with a good chunk of his team. There were plenty of local folks (including a few of us from Dovetail), folks from Microsoft, as well as a bunch of international developers as well. It was an incredible bunch of super-smart folks, all willing to share and help others kick ass. From the Monospace website: Monospace is the conference that teaches .NET software developers and organizations how to use the Mono framework and Microsoft .NET to leverage…

Clarify Architect position

September 25, 2009 For any of you Clarify peeps out there looking for a gig, there’s a Clarify Architect position available in Cincinnati Ohio. Requirements: Very Strong experience with Clarify/Amdocs product platform (Customer/Call management systems) Strong experience with installations, configurations and migrations of Clarify product platform Strong experience with TIBCO. Should be able to perform installations and configurations, as well as setting up interfaces etc Experience with Tuxedo and Weblogic are required. Should be able to perform installations and configurations, as well as any troubleshooting Note: This isn’t a position at Dovetail, and I don’t have any vested interest in filling this job. I’m simply sharing an opportunity with my Clarify compadres.

Using Log4Net in PowerShell

September 23, 2009 I was writing some PowerShell this week, and wanted to do some logging.   I’ve blogged in the past about configuring log4net with the fcSDK within Powershell.   However, this method relied on the log4net handling within our SDK. What if I wanted to log before I got to the SDK initialization?   Kevin shared some of his log4net fu, and I put it into Powershell. Configure Logging   Here’s what I came up with:   function configure-logging() { [system.reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("log4net") > $null; $LogManager = [log4net.LogManager] $global:logger = $LogManager::GetLogger("PowerShell"); if ( (test-path $appSettings["logConfigFilePath"]) -eq $false) { $message = "WARNING: logging config file not found: " +  $appSettings["logConfigFilePath"] write-host write-host $message -foregroundcolor yellow write-host } else { $configFile = new-object System.IO.FileInfo( $appSettings["logConfigFilePath"] ); $xmlConfigurator = [log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator]::ConfigureAndWatch($configFile); } }   Notice that the logging config file is coming from $appSettings. I blogged about this earlier. Logging Config File…

Saving Searches in Dovetail applications

September 21, 2009 Saving Searches in Dovetail AgentOne of the things under development for the next version of Dovetail Agent is the ability to save your favorite searches.Here’s a screenshot:So you can now save your searches, and easily execute them again at anytime.You can also name a search. By default, the name of the search will be the search terms. But you can rename it to whatever you want. For example, as opposed to a search being named: “squeaking washer condition:open casetype:problem” You may choose to rename it as “open cases for squeaky washer”Look for this functionality in the next release of Dovetail Agent.Saving Searches in Dovetail Mobile Agent and Agent LiteCurrently, we don’t have Saved Searches in Dovetail Mobile Agent or Agent Lite. This is on the enhancement list for the future.But, you can easily save a search today by simply using…

Migrating a case from Clarify into a Zendesk ticket

I recently received a request asking how to migrate some data (specifically, cases) from Clarify into Zendesk. Seems the company is in the process of turning off Clarify and rolling out Zendesk.   It’s all about the APIs   We provide a full set of APIs for Clarify within our Dovetail SDK, and Zendesk also provides a set of APIs. So we just need to put them together. PowerShell   I’ve been using PowerShell more and more lately, so I decided to use that as my environment. And because Powershell gives me full access to the .NET framework, I can use classes such as System.Net.WebClient, which makes it easy for me to call the Zendesk REST APIs. Login to Clarify   In a previous post, I showed how to use some common functions in PowerShell for logging into a Clarify database.   . .\DovetailCommonFunctions.ps1 $ClarifyApplication = create-clarify-application;…

How do I know what ID to use for a new table or view?

September 18, 2009 When creating a new table or view in Clarify/Amdocs/Dovetail, a unique ID number must be supplied.How do I know what ID to use?Clarify has defined a range of numbers that are reserved for custom tables and views. They guarantee that they will not use any numbers in this range. So, you need to use a number in this range.There are two ranges reserves for custom IDs: 430-571 and 2000-4999. The rest are reserved for Clarify baseline use.So, you simply need to pick a number in that range that hasn’t yet been used.How do I know what numbers have already been used?The most common method is to export your schema, pick a number, and search your schema to see if its in use. If it is, pick another number, search again. Repeat until you find an available number.A better waySince our…

Some notes on using Oracle 11 Database Instant Client

September 16, 2009 I recently upgraded my day-to-day environment to Windows 7 (64-bit) using MSSQL 2008. This week I needed to do some Oracle work, so I needed to get DovetailAgent working with an Oracle 9 (technically 9.2.0.1.0) database, so I needed Oracle client software. The latest Oracle client version is 11, so I decided to give that a try. The actual Oracle database runs on a VM, so I just needed an Oracle client.   Here are a few notes about getting this working. Install Oracle Instant Client   Install the Oracle 11 Instant Client for your platform.   I installed mine into C:\oracle\product\11.1.0\client_1   I went to edit the tnsnames.ora file, and quickly realized that there wasn’t one. A little googling led me to a helpful blog post at DBAToolZ. Environment Variables   Following the instructions from that blog post, I created a new system environment…