Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

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Posts by Gary Sherman:

Quick auto-login to Dovetail Agent (fcClient)

October 29, 2007 In a call center, most agents tend to stay logged into their CRM application all day long, as it is their primary use application. However there are also many other users who simply log in occasionally, do what they need to do, then log back out again. Personally, I fall into the later category. I log in and out of our Dovetail system all day long. Even more so, I log in and out of my development instance all day long. Which means every time I log in, I have to re-enter my password. Actually, I have to open IE, click my bookmark for my development Dovetail Agent site, enter my password, and click the Login button. Since I do this all day long, I wanted an easier way to do this. One Click Access Dovetail Agent (formerly fcClient) needs…

cctvtmmain : a useful, but broken, and poorly named, utility for closing child cases

October 26, 2007 We recently received an inquiry from a customer asking about Clarify's cctvtmmain utility. Specifically, it was throwing a useless error message, and they wanted our help. Our first response was WTF is cctvtmmain? A little research, and we discovered that its a utility for working with parent and child cases. From the Clarify documentation: The Enterprise Service Manager uses parent and child cases. With parent and child cases, you can associate a group of problems with a common cause. The parent case identifies the root cause. A child case is a customer problem that arises due to the root cause and is linked to the parent case. A child case differs from a Subcase, which is a way for subdividing a case for parallel work by different employees on the same customer problem. For example, suppose a WAN outage occurs…

Microsoft is changing the world – at least part of my world – for the better

October 8, 2007 I’m a big fan of Hugh McLeod, and being that I am part of the Microsoft ecosystem, I have been following his Blue Monster Project. In a recent post, Hugh says: That if Microsoft wishes to change the world, then changing themselves is also, most definitely, a big part of the equation. I saw some of that change this weekend. I saw Scott Guthrie present his team’s new ASP.NET MVC framework. Listening to Scott present, it was clear that he and his team had been listening to the community. They’re listening to the bloggers, the MVPs, the ALT.NET crowd. They listened, and the result was a positive change that came through loud and clear. In the closing session of the ALT.NET conference, Scott Hanselman (who joined Microsoft just a mere 3 weeks ago) openly commented about his time at Microsoft,…

ASP.NET MVC framework

This was an unbelieveably exciting session at the ALT.NET conference. Scott Guthrie demo-ed an upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework. It rocked! The principles: Separation of concerns, unit testing, red/green TDD, maintainable Extensible and pluggable Enable clean urls and HTML Integrate nicely within ASP.NET + .NET core code, support static + dynamic languages Everything is based on an interface, including IHttpRequest and IHttpResponse, which makes them mockable. Jeffrey has a good overview here. I am not an ASP.NET developer. I am a Classic ASP developer. I have watched my co-workers develop ASP.NET (using webforms) and found it overwhelming and confusing. I have been recently watching Ruby on Rails developers, and I have been jealous. Templating that makes sense, clean separation of controller and views, explicit and clean HTML, and testability. At first look, it looks like Microsoft has encapsulated those same principles…

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) Discussion at the ALT.NET conference

I’ve had very little exposure to BDD, so I was interested in learning more. Specifically, most of my BDD knowledge has come from Scott Bellware, so I wanted to hear what others had to say about it. I listened to Scott Bellware’s explanation, but he seemed to focus more on the value (from his standpoint), as opposed to really answering the question “What is BDD?” He stressed the work soluibility. It was great to hear Scott Hanselman question that nomenclature and replace it with grokability. Grokability is more soluable than solubility, commented Roy. I agree. The big questions that seemed to go unanswered: Why should I care about BDD? What benefit does it give me? What I walked away with was a way of using ubitiquous language to bridge the gap between the developers and the business. Joe Ocampo than…

Friday night at the ALT.NET conference

This past weekend was the first ALT.NET conference, held here in Austin, TX. Right from the start, I knew this was going to be special. The list of attendees was amazing. It’s like my blog roll, but live! The format This was not your typical run of the mill conference, where we yearn for interesting hallway conversations to break up monotonous presentations filled with canned PowerPoint presentations. This conference follows the Open Spaces format. Our own Doc List facilitated the conference, and did a great job. He introduced us to the format, and laid out how it all works. It’s completely self-organizing. As attendees, we openly offer up session topics that we want to talk about. Anyone (and it seemed like almost everyone) offered up a topic – some people suggested multiple topics. Like minded topics were gathered together, and…

Using modern JavaScript libraries to create a better user experience in fcClient

September 26, 2007 Over the last couple of years, a number of very useful JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been introduced that make it tremendously easier to build rich web applications. A few of the more popular ones: PrototypeScript.aculo.usMooTools These frameworks allow developers to easily write very rich, cross-browser web applications. I've heard about these libraries for some time, and have experienced many great web apps that use these libraries. So I asked myself whether I could use these modern libraries with fcClient. The answer is a resounding Yes! A simple example: Modify the Save/Discard/Cancel page in order to improve the user experience. How it used to work If a page was "dirty", meaning that data on that page had changed, and the user attempts to dismiss the page (such as by clicking the Done button), then a Save/Discard/Cancel window is posted, which is a new…

SOA: It's NOT about technology

September 17, 2007 Sam Gentile (uber-architect) gently reminds us: SOA: It's The Business Stupid! SOA has value only when applied from a business perspective. The primary goal of SOA is to align the business world with the world of IT in a way that makes them more effective. Period. Technology is only significant in the delivery phase and if we hit customers up with [insert any product here] without understanding the business drivers and processes, not only are we not doing SOA but we continuing to hype technology as the answer, and further disappointing customers with yet “another wave” of application integration technology with different products than the last time. Well said Sam. Way too often, we see technology solutions put in place without a good understanding of the business needs. We must understand the business needs first!

Yes, it demos well. But is it maintainable?

September 11, 2007 A few years ago we created a couple of products to assist customers in converting their Clarify Classic (thick) client forms and code into our thin-client application. Specifically, fcFormsConverter converted Clarify forms into HTML web pages, and fcCodeConverter converted Clarify's proprietary ClearBasic code into JavaScript or VB6. These two products demo-ed really well. In a matter of seconds, these applications created decent looking web pages, and the generated code was definitely JavaScript. Wow! Cool! Not so fast there cowboy. Let's take a closer look at the generated code. The HTML code generated by fcFormsConverter: All elements are absolutely positioned Every element has its own style attribute It lacked any security (privilege class) checking etc... The JavaScript code generated by fcCodeConverter: Doesn't effectively deal with Contextual Objects (what Clarify called their in-memory form variable storage) It had no way of distinguishing server-side…

Technology will not create a customer-centric organization

In a recent destinationCRM article, a couple of Oracle execs say: Transforming your business to a customer-centric organization starts with a CRM-focused services-oriented architecture. I have to disagree. While I concur that well-architected solutions will make it much easier to integrate multiple systems, software architecture will not create a customer-centric organization.A customer-centric organization starts with people and culture. It empowers people to make the right decisions. The culture shifts from a break-fix reactive mode to that of a proactive mindset. It aligns the goals of service, sales, and marketing around the customer.Technology can help achieve these goals. But by itself, it does nothing. There are plenty of technology solutions out there that abide by good SOA practices. Just because a corporation adopts one of these technology solutions, it does not make them customer-centric.There are plenty of organizations that are customer-centric, and they…

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