Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Posts by Gary Sherman:

10 features that power users will love in Dovetail Agent

January 17, 2017 Last year I highlighted 10 things to love about the new Dovetail Agent, that showcased some of the ways that the new Dovetail Agent is so much better than its predecessor.Since we use Dovetail Agent every day for supporting our own customers, we’re power users of the app ourselves. Here, I’ll highlight some of the features that we love, and that we think other power users will love as well.Photo by @laurent_peignault 1. Canned ResponsesCanned responses are re-usable text snippets that you can use when logging emails or notes. Canned responses can save you time if you’re often typing similar responses. Users can create personal canned responses, and can also share canned responses to workgroups, or to everyone.And power users will appreciate the @@ keyboard shortcut. Typing @@ (two at signs) will start an inline canned response picker. You can then start…

Multiple Batch Actions in Dovetail Agent – Video walk-through

January 12, 2017 Within Dovetail Agent, you can perform batch actions on a set of items without having to re-query or re-select the items.For example, I can select a set of cases that are in a queue, accept them all, log a note to all of them, and then close them all – without having to re-query or re-select the set.In older releases, after you accepted the cases, the grid would automatically refresh, and those cases would disappear from the grid (since they’re no longer in the queue).We recently enhanced this functionality, adding an “Automatic Grid Refresh” user preference that controls whether the grid is automatically refreshed or not after a batch action is performed.When disabled, the console grid will not refresh automatically after an action. This allows for multiple actions before refreshing the grid. A Refresh Results button will appear in this…

How To Customize the Clarify Rule Properties form to support function-based Rule Properties

January 11, 2017 Recently I discussed function-based rule properties, which allow you to add your own code for calculating a rule property value.I was asked last week about these – specifically, what if you’re using Dovetail Rulemanager, but not using Dovetail Agent. How do you define these properties? BackgroundThe property can be defined as a function using the Rule Property UI within Dovetail Agent.But if you’re not using Dovetail Agent, but you are using Dovetail Rulemanager, you can still take advantage of these.Rule properties are stored in table_prop_name. There is a new custom field named x_is_function that defines this property as a function. If set to 1, this property will be evaluated as a function. If set to 0 (default), it will not be.So you can simply create your rule property as normal, then you just need to set the x_is_function column to…

Understanding Business Calendars and Holidays

January 4, 2017 When talking about calendars, notifications, and SLAs – questions around calendars and holidays often arise.So lets explain how they work within Dovetail apps. Business CalendarsLets start with Business Calendars. They define the work hours.For example I may have a business calendar named “M-F 9-5” with the following work hours:Monday 9:00 AM – Monday 5:00 PMTuesday 9:00 AM – Tuesday 5:00 PMWednesday 9:00 AM – Wednesday 5:00 PMThursday 9:00 AM – Thursday 5:00 PMFriday 9:00 AM – Friday 5:00 PMPretty simple.Business Calendars can be setup using Dovetail Admin. HolidaysNow lets setup the Holidays.Using Dovetail Agent, navigate to the Admin page, and click on the Holidays icon: This takes us to the Manage Holidays page, where we can create, edit, and delete holidays. Clicking the green plus icon allows us to create a new holiday We can give the holiday a name, a start…

What’s New in Dovetail Agent 14

January 3, 2017 We recently released Dovetail Agent version 14. Here’s a run-down of the highlights. User-Configurable home pageUsers can now set their home page to be any page within the app - such as a queue or a query.For example, perhaps you’re a manager who doesn’t work cases. In this case, you may wish your home page to be My Workgroup's Open Items or one of your custom queries.By default, Home is the same as My Work.To set your home page, use the s+h keyboard shortcut while you’re on any page in the app. Or set it on the User Preferences page.Clicking the Home icon (or using the g+h keyboard shortcut) will take you home.Clicking the My Work icon (or using the g+w keyboard shortcut) will take you to My Work.From the User Preferences page, you can also set or reset your…

How to Automate a Workflow Process by Combining function based Rule Properties and the SDK Toolkit extension

December 21, 2016 When working with parent-child cases, a common workflow is to close the parent case when all the child cases have been closed.We can easily automate this workflow using Dovetail tools and applications. Business RuleHere’s the rule that I want to create:When the last child case is closed, close the parent case.In order for this rule to function, I need to know when the last child case is closed.I can do that by looking at the number of open child cases on the parent case. When this number is equal to zero, I know that all of the children have been closed.But, out of the box, this number is not an available property.But I can easily create my own, using the function-based rule property functionality. NumberOfOpenChildCasesOnParent Rule PropertyFollowing the examples, I can create my own function-based rule property.Given the child case objid, I…

Introducing Custom Function-based Rule Properties

December 20, 2016 Rule Properties Rule properties are used in a number of places throughout the Dovetail suite, including: Business Rule Conditions Business Rule Action Messages Canned Response Variables Task Manager Properties Email Log Templates Traditionally, a rule property would traverse a path through the schema, starting from the base object, and ending at a column. For example, the Contact First Name property for a case would use the path case_reporter2contact:first_name. However, there are instances where a path cannot be traversed, or where a calculation needs to be made. Counts For example, you may wish to fire a business rule only if all of the subcases on a case have been closed. So your two business rule conditions would be: Number of Subcases is greater than zero Number of Open Subcases is equal to zero Or, you may wish to fire…

Experiment: SelfService Timeline

December 6, 2016 One of the things we’ve been experimenting with here at Dovetail is the SelfService Timeline.When looking at a case in Dovetail Agent, a support agent can see some details about what activities a customer performed within our Selfservice app around the time they created a case.Agents can see:When a customer logged inWhat searches they performed, along with how many search results they got backWhich solutions (knowledgebase articles) they viewedAny comments/feedback left on a solutionIt shows any activities that customer within a 1 hour window before and after the case was created.This arms agents with additional information and context about what the customer did around the time they created a case, and agents can avoid providing the same information to a customer. Improve knowledge sharingIn addition, it gives the support center more insight into the specific words or phrases that customers are…

Demystifying the focus_obj2act_entry relation

December 5, 2016 I’ve had multiple people inquire lately about the focus_obj2act_entry relation.It’s definitely a bit of a magic relation, and can be confusing, so I figured it was time to blog about it. Business rule properties allow you to define a value that is determined by traversing through the schema starting from a particular object.For example, the Site Name property for a Case has a path of case_reporter2site:name. So when this rule property gets resolved, the property evaluator knows how to turn that schema path into actual SQL, such as:select name from table_case, table_site where case_reporter2site = table_site.objid and table_case.objid = {The Objid of the Case in Context}Pretty straightforward. focus_obj2act_entry propertiesWhen looking at existing business rule properties, you may notice that some of them start with the relation focus_obj2act_entry.For example, the Logger property uses focus_obj2act_entry:act_entry2user:login_name Notice the "focus_obj2act_entry" part of the path. If you look…

How To Query Case Activities in Dovetail Agent

November 14, 2016 I recently posted about how to Query Anything with Dovetail Agent. Specifically I showed how to setup a custom query for part inventory.In this post, we’ll look at creating a specialized flavor of a existing query.We have built-in query capabilities for work items (including cases), but instead, lets walk-through an example of allowing for querying on case activities.For example, show me how many cases were dispatched to the benefits queue in the last 90 days.For case activities, we’ll need to query the activity log (table_act_entry). In general, I discourage querying against this table using your online production database, as it’s typically the biggest table in the database, and queries against this table can adversely affect performance for everyone using the system. But, depending on your particular use case, your database, database size, database tuning, etc – this may be ok.You…

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