Author: Gary Sherman

Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Products

About:

Posts by Gary Sherman:

Understanding Change Request Workflows and Transitions

September 12, 2016 Dovetail Agent includes support for Change Requests. Recall that a change request is a task you create in response to a reported software bug, hardware defect, or enhancement request. As Change Requests are worked, they follow a workflow process. We use Statuses and Transitions to define the process, and define who can move the Change Request through its workflow steps. Technically, Cases also support a workflow and defined transition. It’s just a very simple one. We can use Cases as a simple example before moving on to the more robust workflow options with Change Requests. Case Workflows Cases have just 2 conditions: Open, and Closed. A case can move from Open to Closed, and from Closed to Open. Within each of those conditions, there are also a set of allowable statuses. For example: Open status options may be: Researching,…

Making URLS in textboxes be clickable in the Clarify Classic Client

September 7, 2016 I was recently posed a question about how to make a URL in a textbox be automatically clickable. I’ve posted in the past about using hyperlinks in the Clarify Client, but this question was a bit different. For example, on the Account form in Clarify, there is a web site textbox. If you type in a URL in that textbox, it is automatically turned into a clickable hyperlink. Lets say that you wanted to do something similar on a custom form. You add a textbox to the form, set its contextual object properly, type in a URL, and then – nothing. It’s not automagically converted into a hyperlink. What’s going on here? Website control on the Account form What Clarify is doing on that website field on the account form is that they're actually using a multiline textbox…

Dovetail Agent 12 – now with Change Requests

September 6, 2016 The recent release of Dovetail Agent 12 adds support for Change Requests. This post will walk through an overview of Change Request functionality within the app.What is a Change Request?From the Clarify documentation:A change request is a task you create in response to a reported software bug, hardware defect, or enhancement request. It constitutes a complete and formal record of the problem or enhancement request, and what has been done to fix the problem or implement the enhancement.Overview of FeaturesCreate and Edit Change RequestsWorkflow: Accept, Assign, Dispatch, Forward, Reject, YankStatus Changes: Fix, Fix Failed, Close, Close as Duplicate,ReopenActions: Log Email, Log Notes, Replicate Change RequestChange Requests are available in My Work, Queries, and Recent ItemsBatch actions are available from My Work and other queries QueryingNaturally, the querying functionality includes support for Change Requests.Users can create their own queries, share queries, favorite…

Canned Responses within the Clarify Classic Client

August 22, 2016 Recently over on the Clarify forum on Toolbox.com, we had an interesting discussion around the use of canned responses within the Clarify Classic Client. I introduced the term Canned Response into that post, as the original request sounded a lot like the Canned Response feature that we recently added in Dovetail Agent. Other terms for this include snippets, templates, and saved replies. Request The original request was: Is it possible to assign a keyboard short cut for case notes field so we can auto populate certain text that is very repeatedly used. Response There's nothing out of the box within the Clarify Client to insert commonly used text within a case note. Depending on what you want to do, it's likely not a difficult customization though. I've done some similar customizations in the past. In one instance, we…

SLA Calculations using Dovetail Carrier

August 9, 2016 I was recently working on a project that wanted to track SLAs, but the specific SLA rules were more complex than could be handled just using business rules. But, the logic would be pretty straightforward to enforce via code. So we came up with a solution that used a combination of business rules and a custom Dovetail Carrier extension. In this post, I’ll walk through how we accomplished this. There’s a lot of information here, so grab a cup of coffee (or perhaps a glass of scotch), settle in, and lets get to it. Photo by @ederpozo SLAs Over the past 20+ years of working in the Support/CRM space, I’ve worked with a number of organizations that want to enforce SLAs (service level agreements) in their Support app. Example SLAs All cases must be responded to within 2 business…

Pro Tip: Query Ordering in Dovetail Agent

August 4, 2016 When viewing queries in Dovetail Agent, they’re ordered alphabetically. I was recently asked if there was a way to change the ordering. For example, I may have a certain query that I always want to be at the top of the list. Nope, sorry. They’re alphabetical. But, you can use a few tricks to get the ordering you want. A-Z Purely based on letters, if we want something at the top of the list, we could have its name being with “a”, or prefix it with “aaa” . Similar for “zzz” Reminds me of those businesses that would name their companies so that they would be first in the phone book: I’m not a big fan of this approach, but it does work. But we can do better. 0-9 Of course, we can also use numbers,…

Introducing the SDK Toolkit extension in Dovetail Carrier

August 2, 2016 We recently released an updated version of Dovetail Carrier, and this version includes a new SDK Toolkit Extension. I’m super excited about this new extension – so lets get into the details. But first, a quick refresher on Dovetail Carrier. What is Dovetail Carrier? Carrier is a flexible and customizable message handling framework for your Dovetail or Clarify CRM application. It allows the automation of virtually any internal CRM processes associated with communicating with external systems. Carrier uses messaging, a method of communication between software components or applications that enables distributed communication that is loosely coupled, to enable organizations to establish efficient dataflow between their systems. Extensions The Carrier framework is designed to support extensions to its baseline capabilities, for implementing solutions to your organization's business needs. Extensions shipped by Dovetail have been designed to be customizable and…

Email Enhancements in Dovetail Agent 11 – Video walk-through

July 27, 2016 In Dovetail Agent 11, we've made a number of enhancements that improve working with email, including: Reply / Reply All / Forward The Log Email form can now be popped out to a full screen modal window Drag-and-drop file attachments Preview/download a file attachment Remove a file attachment Canned responses This video is a quick walk-through of these enhancements Direct link to video on YouTube

Canned Responses in Dovetail Agent & Video Walk-through

July 22, 2016 I recently posted some details about Canned Responses in Dovetail Agent, including detailed descriptions and a bunch of screenshots. That ended up being a pretty long post, so I figured a video walk-through of canned responses might be more useful. Enjoy. Direct link to video on YouTube

Increasing user productivity with Canned Responses

July 21, 2016 In Dovetail Agent 11, we introduced Canned Responses. In a previous post, I gave an introduction to canned responses. Here, I’ll go into much more detail. What are Canned Responses? Canned 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. Canned responses save users time, increase productivity, and enable more consistent responses to customers. Creating Canned Responses From the User menu, click on the Canned Responses item: Which will take you to the Manage Canned Responses page: Click on the + sign in the My Canned Responses tab header to create a new one: Canned Response Content Now that we’re…

« Prev
...
4
5
6
...
10
20
30
...
Next »