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Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

Gary Sherman
Gary Sherman
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Posts by Gary Sherman:

Just stating the obvious: your test environment should match your production environment

March 5, 2008 I was working an urgent support issue with a customer today who had a problem in their production system after upgrading the database client software. He said that there were no issues when he made this change in the test environment. I was surprised that the issue hadn't occurred in his test environment. Come to find out, the test environment and production environments are not the same. The test environment is Windows 2000. The production environment is Windows 2003 Server. Hence why he saw different behavior. Your test environment should match your production environment! Otherwise, it's not really a test environment for your production system. It's just an environment.   Tags:  Best Practices. Stating the Obvious. Things we learned on our first day in IT.

Neal Ford on Car Rental Counters, Enterprise IT, and Self-inflicted Complexity

February 19, 2008 Neal Ford has a good post recounting his experience at a car rental counter - the same experience I've had many times. I too often wondered - why are they typing so much? He ties this into the decisions made everyday in IT organizations at enterprises, which often yield self-inflicted complexity. No one intends for it to happen, but then no one is standing up, challenging the decisions being made, and the work being produced. I've seen this over and over again in my years of working with large enterprise IT projects.  Neal says "Going back to first principles is hard". Yes, it is. When I was in my first consulting job, on my very first assignment, doing at project at Sprint PCS, I was complaining to my boss about the assignment, and I said "but this is hard". He…

Perspectives from a sales guy

February 14, 2008 Kent Valentine, a member of our sales team, has dunked his toe into the blogging waters.I'm looking forward to reading his tales from the field, which I'm sure will offer a different perspective than what us techies have to say.

More Campfire Integration

February 13, 2008 Kevin Miller recently had a recent post talking about how we have notifications from our Clarify/Dovetail system show up in Campfire.   When a case is dispatched to our support queue, we get a notification in Campfire. That tends to be where we all "hang out", so its a perfect place for group notifications.   Kevin had another great idea today that we should also post a message when the case is accepted by someone, so that we know someone has picked it up and is working it.   A quick business rule:   Object Type: Case Rule Name/Description: Campfire notification upon case accept Start Event: Accept Cancel Events:  Conditions: [Current Owner Workgroup] = Support Action Title: Notify Campfire Action Type: Command Line  Start Action: 0 minutes From: Event Creation Using: Elapsed Time Repeat: Never Message:   c:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe C:\repo\DovetailAutomation\focus\campfire\classic-campfire.rb " [Object Type] [Object ID]  has been accepted by [Logger]. : http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/fcclient/console/console.asp?command=casebyid&param1=[Object ID] "…

Expanding text boxes, font-sizing, and readability within Clarify

February 11, 2008 While talking with a customer recently, they were showing off a "feature" that they had implemented. Whenever they added a note to a case, they have some ClearBasic code that automatically uppercases the entire text of the note before saving it to the database. I shuddered. They asked me if we could do this in our DovetailAgent application. I said Yes, we can, but No, I won't do it. I think he was a bit shocked.Why won't I do this? Because that's coupling your content to its presentation. There's already been much written on this topic, so I won't expand on it here.After I dug into it a bit more with the customer, it turns out that the reason they did this was because the case history is hard to read, and they felt that uppercasing all the text made…

Clarify on an iPhone

AppSwing looks to have created their own front end for Clarify, geared for iPhone users. The functionality is limited, but it looks interesting. Although with my fat fingers, I would have a hard time typing in case notes on the iPhone "keyboard". They have a video that shows it in action. Slick.

Nothin But .Net is coming to Austin

January 30, 2008 JP is bringing his famous Nothin But .NET boot camp here to Austin in April. I've been reading JP's blog for a while, and got to meet him briefly at the ALT.NET conference in Austin last year, and he's always impressed me with his pragmatic and level-headed approach. For those of you in Austin, this sounds like a great opportunity to advance your skills.

My vote for worst web site: the Microsoft Partner Program

January 21, 2008 It's that time of year again - time to renew our Microsoft Partner Certification. I hate this process. I especially hate their website - it very well may be the worst design in usability I've ever encountered.Unsupported browserTo start, they only want you to use Internet Explorer. Opening it in Firefox yields this lovely message: You are using an unsupported Internet browser. Please use the most recent non-beta version of Internet Explorer to access this page. If you continue you will likely experience performance issues. Please download this supported version or proceed to the PMC page you requested."Please use the most recent non-beta version of Internet Explorer" So, that implies that the Partner Program doesn't think that beta versions of IE are stable. Nice.OK, so I click the download link (just because I'm curious), and where does it take me?That's right…

How many time_bomb records do you generate per day?

January 15, 2008 Curious: on average,  how many time_bomb records does your Clarify system generate per day?  How can you determine  this?Assuming you're not using objid caching (which is the typical  scenario), simply take note of the current maximum objid in table_time_bomb.  Here is sample SQL for doing this: select max(objid) from  table_time_bomb Take note of the date and time. Then, simply run the same  query a day later, again taking note of the date and time. Subtract the two  objids, and that will tell you approximately how many time_bomb records have  been processed in that time period.