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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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Adding a signature to Log Email in Dovetail Mobile Agent using Ubiquity or GreaseMonkey

September 29, 2008 As I mentioned in a previous post, I've started using Dovetail Mobile Agent for my day-to-day case activities. Its still early in its project lifecycle, so it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles (yet), but that's OK with me. For example, you can Log an Email, but it doesn't have the capability to automatically populate a signature within the email. Since this is something that I wanted now, here's how to make that happen, without modifying the application itself. Ubiquity In a previous post, I detailed my first Ubiquity command for working with Dovetail Mobile Agent. Now, we'll add a new command for inserting my signature. The Ubiquity code: CmdUtils.CreateCommand({   name: "signature",   icon: "

User CSS styles for Dovetail Mobile Agent

September 18, 2008 I recently wrote a blog post explaining how I used Stylish to make Dovetail Mobile Agent look the way I wanted it to.See here:http://blogs.dovetailsoftware.com/blogs/gsherman/archive/2008/09/17/styling-dovetail-mobile-agent-without-modifying-the-app-itself.aspxAs a reference, here's the actual Stylish/CSS code I used  @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);@-moz-document url-prefix("http://mycompany.com/mobileagent") {body{line-height:2.5em !important;padding:20px 50px 50px 50px !important;background:#666666 !important;;}h1{font-size:2em !important;}#navigation{text-align:left !important;padding:5px !important;padding-left:0px !important;}#content{min-height:500px !important;background:white !important;padding-left:20px !important;}#header h1{padding:5px !important;padding-left:20px !important;}#footer-navigation p{padding:10px !important;}#footer-navigation{background:#c5cb8d !important;}label{width:150px !important;float:left !important;font-weight:bold !important;}h3{line-height:2.5em !important;color:black!important;font-weight:bold !important;}ul{margin-left:2em !important;}a{text-decoration:underline !important;}#listings {margin-top:20px !important;}#listings ul{line-height:1em !important;}.action-navigation, #action-navigation{text-align:left !important;line-height:3em !important;}.action-link{border:none  !important;font-size:1em !important;} .action-link a, #footer-navigation  a{color:black !important;background-color:#E3EDE6 !important;padding:5px !important;border:solid 1px black !important;text-decoration:none!important;}.action-link a:hover, #footer-navigation a:hover{color:white!important;background-color:navy !important;}p{line-height:1.2em !important;}textarea{width:60% !important;;height:200px !important;;}#phone-log-form label{width:0px !important;}#phone-log-form #message{display:block !important;margin-top:45px !important;}#phone-log-form {text-align:left !important;padding:0 !important;padding-bottom:50px !important;}#call-contact {text-align:left !important;border:none !important;padding-left:0px !important;}#case-title {text-align:left !important;}#case-title:before {content:"Case Title: ";}#assign-case, #find-employee,  #employee-listing{text-align:left !important;}#dispatch-case, #find-queue, #queue-listing, #employee-listing{text-align:left !important;font-size:1.1em !important;line-height:1.5em !important;}.case-listing{padding:5px !important;border-bottom:none !important;}.even{  background-color: #eee !important;}.action-link{visibility:hidden !important;}.action-link a{visibility:visible !important;}b{display:none !important;}#search-form label{width:100px !important;}#search-ui ,#search-instructions {text-align:left !important;}#search-announcement, #search-result-details{background-color:#E3EDE6 !important;}#searchResults hr{display:none !important;}.search-results-summary {border-bottom:none !important;}}

Styling Dovetail Mobile Agent – without modifying the app itself

September 17, 2008 I've started using Dovetail Mobile Agent for my day-to-day case activities. Its simplicity and ease of use really pleases me. Even though it was targeted as an app for mobile devices, it works just as well using normal browsers on desktops & laptops. However, its currently styled for mobile devices, with their limited form factor. We may get to the point of creating different stylesheets for different browsers, but we're just not there yet. But I'm impatient, so last night I decided to take matters into my own hands. The default styles look good on a mobile device, but could be better on a desktop. Adding my own styles with Stylish My browser of choice is Firefox. (I am digging Google Chrome, but its current lack of plug-ins keeps it from being my default browser). One of the extensions available…

Unified Login in the Clarify Classic Client

September 16, 2008   I received a question today about using Windows authentication with Clarify on SQL Server.   We wrote about this years ago, in one of our newsletters, but I figured it couldn't hurt to share it again here.   Unified Login   Unified Login (sometimes referred to as Integrated Windows Security) is a very useful feature built in the base Clarify product. It is only available for Windows clients, and only if the database is Microsoft SQL Server. But if you have this configuration, you might consider Unified Login.   Unified Login allows you to use your domain login (the login credentials you provided when you logged in to Windows) to log in to the Clarify system. It requires your domain user name be the same as your Clarify login name. If it is not, you cannot use this feature. When you…

Proposal for a change to EmailAgent

September 10, 2008 We're considering a change to Dovetail EmailAgent, and wanted to float it by our users to see if anyone had any concerns or objections. Currently, when EmailAgent adds more information to a case, it actually performs a Log Note action. Clarify has a "Email In" activity, but we don't currently use that. This is odd. EmailAgent also creates attachments for any files that were attached to the email. One of the issues is that there is no relationship between the notes (notes_log) and the attachments (doc_inst), so it can be difficult to determine exactly which attachments were for which email. Why Log Notes? History, mostly. We don't have an "Email In" API in ClearBasic - which is the language that our original email processing engine was written in (it was then called SuperEmailClerk). So, the "Log Notes" API was used…

My first Ubiquity command : view a case in Dovetail

September 8, 2008 I was pretty excited to play with Ubiquity, a new Firefox extension that lets me think and act in a more natural language with my PC. From the Ubiquity Tutorial: Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web. You're used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar. With Ubiquity installed, you'll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box. The commands that come with Ubiquity are just the beginning: anyone can create new commands and share them. Some of the built-in commands include: add-to-calendar calculate define ebay-search email flickr google map search tinyurl weather zoom After playing with the build-in commands, I was ready to try and write my…

Customizing Seeker: Indexing and Searching Custom Objects

August 15, 2008 In previous posts, we've covered the basics of Seeker, along with searching custom attributes of an object (such as case.x_notes).Continuing on, lets look at how to index and search custom objects.In our environment, we keep track of the software license keys that we send to our customers, and we do this in our Dovetail system.This is an entirely custom object, so this will make a great example.The License Key TableUsing BOLT, we can quickly see what this table looks like:We need to know the database table information so we can modify the documentSpecifications.xml file. Modify the documentSpecifications.xml fileSeek.exe is the application that performs the actual indexing. The documentSpecifications.xml is the configuration file that seek.exe uses so that it knows what to index.The documentSpecifications.xml file consists of many dovetailDocumentSpecifications. For example, there is a specification for case, one for subcase, one for…

Customizing Seeker: Searching custom data

July 30, 2008 In a previous post, I covered some details on Seeker - our full-text search engine, along with its integration with applications, such as Dovetail Agent. One of the other things I really like about Seeker is its extensibility. Via configuration, Seeker can easily be extended to search additional (including custom) fields (such as a custom field on the case or solution). Here we'll cover that scenario. Modify the documentSpecifications.xml file Seek.exe is the application that performs the actual indexing. The documentSpecifications.xml is the configuration file that seek.exe uses so that it knows what to index. The documentSpecifications.xml file consists of many dovetailDocumentSpecifications. For example, there is a specification for case, one for subcase, one for solution, etc. The contents section determines what columns are searched. For example, the baseline contents for the case object includes id_number, title, and case_history: <contents>…

Search your Clarify/Dovetail data

July 28, 2008 Dovetail Seeker is our search engine for Clarify/Dovetail. One of the things I really like about Seeker is that its easy to take advantage of its search results from different applications. Because Seeker is a web service, its relatively easy to have applications use this search service. For example, we've added Search capabilities to Dovetail Agent and to Dovetail SelfService. We've also added Search to our external website, and Search can also be added to the Clarify Classic Client.  Many applications can use the same instance of Seeker for searching:     Request/Response Each of these applications simply make an HTTP request to Dovetail Seeker, and the results are returned in a JSON format. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write, and also easy for machines to parse and…