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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience

January 19, 2009 Smashing Magazine has a list of 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience There's some cool ideas in there. The sortable lists technique would be useful for Drop-Down list management in DovetailAdmin. I also like the Scrollable HTML table plugin - which keeps the header row visible when scrolling through a long table.

Clarify jobs

January 13, 2009   Surprisingly, there were a bunch of Clarify related jobs that popped up on my radar this week.   Any of you Clarify folks looking for work?       Director of Continuous Improvement at ADP     By far, my favorite job title of the week month year.   Experience with Amdocs/Clarify ClearSupport or equivalent Client Relationship management system is required .   link Support Specialist at Nortel   You will be working on the Nortel Global Clarify instance which is a highly customized version of ClarifyCRM 12i software, from Amdocs Inc.   ClearSupport, ClearQuality, ClearContracts, ClearLogistics   link Clarify Amdocs - techno functional - New York   Overall Clarify 10.x through Amdocs CRM6 Experience   link CRM Business Analyst   The ideal candidate will have Amdocs (Clarify) and Siebel knowledge.   link Clarify Developer   Experience with Clarify 13 version, Plus…

Improving case history

January 12, 2009 The case history within Clarify has always been a bit of a sore spot with users for a long time. It was good - in that it made it easy to quickly review the details of the case. But, it did have its issues: Its just one giant text blob. You have no control over the formatting. Its in chronological order. Sometimes this is OK, but typically you scroll to the bottom to read the most recent activity. You don't have control over the timestamp format (DD/MM/YY vs. MM/DD/YY, as an example). The timezone of the timestamp isn't clear. It isn't easy to hide/remove certain entries. Its limited to 32K. If the case history his its 32K limit, users would see this message: THIS FIELD HAS EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. THE ABOVE ENTRY MAY HAVE BEEN TRUNCATED. PLEASE REFER TO…

Rich Text in the Clarify Classic Client

December 18, 2008 Someone recently asked me if the Clarify Classic Client could handle rich text in multi-line text controls - i.e. can text be made bold, italics, use different fonts/colors, etc. Out of the box - no. Clarify handles plain text only. But, we can customize Clarify. One approach to this problem is to use an ActiveX control that supports rich text. As a proof-of-concept, I downloaded the SpellEditor RichTextBox RTF Control, and slapped it onto the Solution form. (There's a bunch of available controls out there. I'm not saying this is the best one, but it was sufficient to prove my concept.) I then added a bit of ClearBasic code: During form_load, take the description field contents from the solution's contextual object, and stuff it into the RTF text property of the control. During form_save, take the RTF text from the…

Clarify Classic Client Quick Reference Guide

December 17, 2008 Here's a quick reference guide for user options, shortcuts, and keyboard navigation for the Clarify client.   I think Ctrl + Down Arrow within a text box is one of the most useful (and most unknown) shortcuts. Ctrl-F6 is also pretty useful, although I find it difficult to remember (and to type)    

hMailServer: a free email server that’s great for demos and testing

December 3, 2008 When doing testing or demos, I often need to send and receive email. For example, Dovetail EmailAgent requires a mail server for receiving incoming mail. Dovetail Rulemanager needs a mail server for sending outgoing notifications by email, as well as for sending outgoing email.   When I'm in the office, I could use our corporate mail server (although I don't like to use production systems for testing). If I have internet access, I can use GMail, or another free hosted SMTP/POP3 server. But when I'm on the road, its not uncommon to end up in a conference room somewhere without internet access. So I prefer to have everything I need loaded on my laptop - and this includes a mail server. hMailServer   hMailServer is a free email server that's great for demos and testing. I've been using it for teh last 6 months or…

Improved Case and Solution linking workflow within Dovetail Agent

November 18, 2008 One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough.   This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements.   Making it easier for agents to link solutions and cases would certainly be beneficial. If its hard, they're less likely to do it. So, make it easy.     Dovetail Agent (version 4.0) has simplified the ability to link a solution to one or more cases. Regardless of how you get to a Solution (via Search, Find by ID, or simply opening it from a queue or WIPbin), you can easily link the Solution to one (or more) of your…

Incorporating Dovetail Search into your Case and Solution Workflow within the Clarify Client

An additional customization is provided with Dovetail Search for Clarify that allows Search to be incorporated into your case and solution workflow. For example, from the Case form, clicking the Dovetail Search button will open the Search form, and can search Solutions using the case title. A solution can be opened from the Search results form, and the Link to Case button on the Solution form can be clicked, which will link the solution to the case. Clicking on the Dovetail Search button from the case form: opens the Search form, and automatically executes a search using the case title: Clicking on one of the solutions from the search results opens the Solution form: and then clicking the Link to Case button links the case to the solution. Super easy.

Dovetail Search for Clarify

Ever since we introduced Dovetail Seeker this summer, I was anxious to incorporate its capabilities with our applications. It is integrated within Dovetail Agent, Dovetail SelfService, and Dovetail Mobile Agent. Kevin also demonstrated how to incorporate it into your own applications (his particular example was integrating Seeker with an ASP.NET 2.0 web application). We've now integrated Seeker with the Clarify Classic Client, bringing the simple and ubiquitous search box into Clarify. Dovetail Search provides the User Interface (UI) for searching and displaying retrieved search results. Dovetail Search for Clarify makes a request to Seeker, and Seeker returns a set of search results. Dovetail Search displays these results in a simple, intuitive format. What can you search?You can search any data in your Clarify database. Out of the box, Dovetail Search is configured for searching cases, solutions, change requests (bugs), subcases, and part request details. Its easily configurable, so…