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Refreshing Component Guids in your Wix XML

July 14, 2010 Right now I am working once again with Wix which can be quite shall we put it nicely: freaking traumatic. I promise this post will not entirely be me moaning about Windows Installer crap-titude. Rather, this post may actually help you out of a weird jam some day. My Windows Installer (.msi based) installed application started to refuse to uninstall with a weird error. Registry Component<GUID><GUID> could not be found. The only resulting way for me to get rid of the install was to use the Windows Install Clean Up which is pretty scary because Microsoft doesn’t provide it as a download because: While the Windows Installer Cleanup utility resolved some installation problems, it sometimes damaged other components installed on the computer. Because of this, the tool has been removed from the Microsoft Download Center. Yikes! Anyhow. The reason this…

Upcoming Free Training Webinars: Advanced Rulemanager and Business Rules

I previously announced an Advanced Business Rules and Rulemanager talk. After further consideration I’ve decided to break this into two sessions. There’s a lot of information to share, and I don’t want to rush it (nor do I want everyone overwhelmed with too much info at one time). Advanced Business Rules (Part 1) Understanding Rule Properties Understanding recipient aliases Creating your own rule properties Better ways to search/view business rules Tips & Tricks etc. When: Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CDT Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/902787625   Advanced Business Rules (Part 2) User-defined Business Rule Events Business rules based on custom object types New Event Creation Times and Calendars Custom Notification Methods Time Bombs Tips & Tricks Troubleshooting Tips etc. When: Thursday, July 29, 2010 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CDT Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/138608689

Objid generation – including limits

July 13, 2010 Anyone who’s been around Clarify for a while is probably well aware of the objid (primary key) generation algorithm. The basic algorithm The basic algorithm looks like: objid = (2^28 * adp_db_header.site_id) + (next_val + 1) Additional Notes next_val is the next unique value for the given table. next_val for an object (type_id) is obtained first from adp_tbl_oid_unused.   If none are available from that table then adp_tbl_oid is used.  If you’re on older versions of Clarify on Oracle, next_val comes from an Oracle sequence instead of adp_tbl_oid. Discovery I was recently working with a customer, and we seem to have discovered a limit to this algorithm. It seems that if the result of the objid generation is greater than the “defined range”, then it starts over again (at the start of the range). Defined Range When I say defined range,…

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent

July 12, 2010 This is the first installment of a new series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. There are usually a few components involved – schema changes, customized forms, and custom code – that all need to be converted in some form or fashion. For this series of posts, I will be migrating the Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin. EMU is part of the Administration Series, and was last modified when Dovetail Software was still known as First Choice Software. The first things to do is to examine the Employee Manager Utility product. EMU is an administration tool that allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup. New employees…

Rulemanager webinar follow-up

July 8, 2010 Thanks to those that attended today’s webinar on Rulemanager. We had a good turnout, and some good questions from attendees. Slides The slides from today’s presentation are available on Slideshare.   Links Rulemanager Wiki: http://rulemanager.wikispaces.com/ Blogs: https://clarify.dovetailsoftware.com/search/?q=rulemanager Knowledgebase Articles: http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/resources/solutions/rulemanager.aspx Code I was asked to share the script I used to post a message to Campfire using a web service. I’ve posted CampfireSpeak.bat and CampfireSpeak.ps1 to github: http://github.com/gsherman/powershell And here’s the business rule message I used: c:powershellcampfirespeak.bat [Object Type] [Object ID] has been dispatched to the [Current Queue] queue. http://myserver/agentlite/cases/summary/[Object ID] Also, you do this same thing using curl without using Powershell. I blogged how to do this previously here. Upcoming Webinar: Advanced Business Rules I’ll be doing a follow-up webinar in 2 weeks. The second session will build on the first, and will discuss more advanced usage of Business…

Reminder: Rulemanager and Business Rules Webinar this week

July 6, 2010 Just a little reminder that I will be hosting a webinar this Thursday. It will be an introduction and overview of Rulemanager and Business Rules. What is Rulemanager? What is a Business Rule? What can business rules do (and not do)? Examples Extensibility Clarify Rulemanager vs. Dovetail Rulemanager etc. When: Thursday, July 8, 2010 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CDT Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/247692112

Using the Tika Java Library In Your .Net Application With IKVM

July 2, 2010 Update   I've created a project page for TikaOnDotNet on github. Tika On DotNet   This may sound scary and heretical but did you know it is possible to leverage Java libraries from .Net applications with no TCP sockets or web services getting caught in the crossfire? Let me introduce you to IKVM, which is frankly magic:   IKVM.NET is an implementation of Java for Mono and the Microsoft .NET Framework. It includes the following components: A Java Virtual Machine implemented in .NET A .NET implementation of the Java class libraries Tools that enable Java and .NET interoperability   Using IKVM we have been able to successfully integrate our Dovetail Seeker search application with the Tika text extraction library implemented in Java. With Tika we can easily pull text out of rich documents from many supported formats. Why Tika?  Because there is nothing comparable in the .Net world as…

Dovetail Seeker Sneak Preview

June 29, 2010 Lately we have been giving some love to Dovetail Seeker our search solution for Clarify/Dovetail CRM. I wanted to share a couple teaser screenshots of a couple features we are working on for our next release.   These screenshots are from an example “reference” web application we are including with Dovetail Seeker to show off all its new fancy features and to get developers excited and empowered to build their own search clients.   The these screens are pretty raw they are from an example app, a proving ground, which will undergo much improvement and change. You’ve Got Your Documents In My Search Index!   The most requested and exciting new feature to Dovetail Seeker is “Rich Document Indexing”.   You select a directory you want indexed and our Seeker will look for files, extracting their content making them searchable.…

Upcoming Free Training Webinars: Rulemanager and Business Rules

June 28, 2010   A few months ago, I threw out some thoughts regarding Clarify training and knowledge: One of the themes I’ve picked up on recently is that there seems to be a lot of organizations who still use Clarify /Amdocs, but not to its full potential. Nowhere near its full potential. I’ve recently talked to a bunch of people who don’t really know how to use it fully, extend it, what functionality is available, or even how to maintain it. I’ve seen the same issue on both sides of the house: Technical IT resources who don’t know how to customize it, what all of the moving components are, what to do when something goes wrong, or even where to look for knowledge, Business resources who don’t fully know what the product is capable or what exactly they even have. For example,…

Socialcast Integration, Episode 2: The UI

June 24, 2010 In a previous post, I discussed how to publish activities from your Clarify/Dovetail CRM system into Socialcast. Cool stuff.Continuing on this same line, I wanted to explore having access to Socialcast within your CRM application UI. Since this is where agents spend a good deal of their day, why not have a widget that shows their home stream, and allows them to share, update, and comment?Socialcast widgetWe can easily embed a Socialcast widget right onto the agent’s console within DovetailAgent. This would allow agents to see their home stream, post an update, or comment on someone else’s post.We can use the Google Gmail gadget provided by Socialcast to do this. Normally this is used as a gadget within Gmail or iGoogle, but we can use it anywhere we want.Once you’re logged into your Socialcast site, navigate to the Socialcast Applications…