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Firing Business Rules based on the business hours of a queue

November 6, 2007 One of our customers posed an interesting problem to me this week. They have offices in different locations, in different time zones, with different business hours. The employees in these offices work on different hours from one another, meaning that while one group is working, another group is not working, and vice-versa. The issue comes in when one group dispatches a case to a queue to be worked by the other group. More specifically, the issue is when the queue members should get notified by RuleManager. If the queue members are off-hours, then they should get notified as soon as their next work day starts. Seems like it should be straight-forward. Let's give it a go. First Try Let's create a specific test example to illustrate the notification process. I created two sites, the Texas Support Center (in CST), and…

SLA Monitoring

August 31, 2007 One of the common tasks for a support/call center manager is making sure the team is living up to its service level agreements (SLAs). Pretty much every customer I've ever dealt with has different SLAs. As you can imagine, there's a zillion ways for companies to setup and track their SLAs. Example SLAs: All cases must be responded to within 2 business hours All Urgent priority cases must be responded to within 1 hour regardless of business hours All cases must be responded to within the phone response time as stated on the contract All cases must be closed within 5 days. All subcases of type "Hardware Upgrade" must have a technician onsite within 36 hours. All new cases for a Gold level customer must get a call back from a senior tech within 1 hour. An initial response…

A new version of fcSDK and finalizing the move to .NET 2.0

August 28, 2007 New version of fcSDK available fcSDK version 2.3.2 is now officially available. The big news in this release is that the fcSDK is now built on the .NET 2.0 framework. (fcSDK was previously built on .NET 1.1) There are also number of bug fixes in this release. The documentation details What's New in this version. To obtain this release, create a request using Dovetail SelfService, or send us an email. .NET 2.0 With the fcSDK now ported, this finalizes our migration effort from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. All of our .NET based products are now built on .NET 2.0: fcSDK SchemaEditor RuleManager SEC.NET

Expanding your varchar columns beyond 255 in Clarify is easy with the right tools

May 16, 2007 We had a support case that came in this week asking if there were issues with expanding a varchar(255) field to a larger value, such as varchar(500). Specifically, this customer was asking about expanding the internal notes field on the notes_log table (table_notes_log.internal). This customer is on an older version of Clarify (version 8 or version 9, IIRC), but they're using a more current version of Microsoft SQL Server (either 2000 or 2005, I forget exactly which one). These versions of MSSQL can handle much larger varchar lengths. I believe MSSQL 2000 can handle up to varchar(8000). I think the 255 limit is left over from the Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 days. It should work, I thought. One way to find out: let's try it. My environment for this test is Clarify 9 with MSSQL 2000. Clarify Data…

Schema changes are a breeze with SchemaScript

March 23, 2007 One of our users came to me this week with a request to expand the size of the contact's job title field. Apparently people now have ridiculously long titles such as Assistant to the Regional Director of Synergistic Business Alliances, Northwest Montana Region. Using a simple SchemaScript and the Dovetail SchemaEditor, this change is trivial. Here's my complete script: <schemaScript xmlns="http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/2006/10/SchemaScript.xsd"> <updateColumn table="contact" name="title"> <length>100</length> </updateColumn></schemaScript> Because I have an XSD that defines what schema scripts should look like, and I used Visual Studio to create my script, I know that my script is valid before actually running it with SchemaEditor. It for some reason I had a typo or I didn't close a tag, VS would visually let me know.With my script in place, I simply run SchemaEditor to apply the changes: schemaeditor.exe -apply Output Report: Dovetail SchemaEditor Difference…

Uniqueness of Relation Names

March 13, 2007 Here's an interesting scenario that we recently ran into when developing our SchemaEditor application for Clarify. In Clarify, the rule is that relation names must be unique within a table, which makes sense. For example, I cannot have two relations named case2site on the case table. The schema editing tools (ddcomp, DD Editor, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will disallow this. But there is no problem having case2site on the case table and case2site on the subcase table (although it's a bad naming convention, it's not illegal). However, in Microsoft SQL Server databases, Clarify creates relate stored procedures for relations. For example, the following relation: case2subcase OTM subcaseINV_REL=subcase2case COMMENT="Subcases originated from the case" will produce the following stored proc: create procedure rl_case2subcase( @case1 int, @subcase2 int) as update table_subcase set subcase2case = @case1 where objid=@subcase2 How and where do these stored procs get used?…

Hello

January 30, 2007 Just wanted to introduce myself. I am Kevin Miller long time blog reader first time blogger. I have been with Dovetail Software for almost exactly 3 years now and enjoyed helping out on Dovetail SDK, RuleManager and SchemaEditor. This will likely be a blog filled with technical content about the products we make and the technologies we dabble into. I will also likely serialize some support information that will be valuable to our customers. I will warn you my sentence structure will leave you guessing but hopefully the content will make amends for my grammatical transgressions.

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