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Improving case history

January 12, 2009 The case history within Clarify has always been a bit of a sore spot with users for a long time. It was good - in that it made it easy to quickly review the details of the case. But, it did have its issues: Its just one giant text blob. You have no control over the formatting. Its in chronological order. Sometimes this is OK, but typically you scroll to the bottom to read the most recent activity. You don't have control over the timestamp format (DD/MM/YY vs. MM/DD/YY, as an example). The timezone of the timestamp isn't clear. It isn't easy to hide/remove certain entries. Its limited to 32K. If the case history his its 32K limit, users would see this message: THIS FIELD HAS EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. THE ABOVE ENTRY MAY HAVE BEEN TRUNCATED. PLEASE REFER TO…

Avoid Mickey Mouse Email Loops

  Say you have an application (i.e. bot, script, automaton, service)  polling an email account (POP3 or IMAP) for emails. And say that your application sends an automated response back to the sender of the email. Be careful. You can easily get into situations that will create an email loop or worse yet the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome.   After sending email from an automaton it is quite common for the receiving mail servers to bounce emails back or accounts to temporarily respond with an “Out of Office” response. If your service is not smart enough to ignore automated responses to it’s own emails? Well. The streams will cross and poorly written email services will implode under the weight of your unending email loop. Kittens die. System administrators call you. This is bad.   RFC 3834 comes to the rescue with…

Sending Knowledge To Your Customers

January 5, 2009 Our next release of Dovetail Mobile Agent is focusing on adding functionality for agents and customers alike to access Dovetail CRM knowledge. I wanted to talk about one of the features we are adding to allow agents to send a solution to a case. Solutions = Knowledge A little background. Dovetail CRM support agents can capture Solutions to common problems. These solutions are more useful when exposed to the customer so they can solve their own problems. We do just this on Dovetail’s website. Let Me Find That For You It is pretty common though that a customer will not be diligent enough to search the existing knowledge base. Or diligent customers may not know the correct search terms and are not getting useful hits from your knowledge base. Frustrated they’ll create a case for a common problem. For these…

Rich Text in the Clarify Classic Client

December 18, 2008 Someone recently asked me if the Clarify Classic Client could handle rich text in multi-line text controls - i.e. can text be made bold, italics, use different fonts/colors, etc. Out of the box - no. Clarify handles plain text only. But, we can customize Clarify. One approach to this problem is to use an ActiveX control that supports rich text. As a proof-of-concept, I downloaded the SpellEditor RichTextBox RTF Control, and slapped it onto the Solution form. (There's a bunch of available controls out there. I'm not saying this is the best one, but it was sufficient to prove my concept.) I then added a bit of ClearBasic code: During form_load, take the description field contents from the solution's contextual object, and stuff it into the RTF text property of the control. During form_save, take the RTF text from the…

Clarify Classic Client Quick Reference Guide

December 17, 2008 Here's a quick reference guide for user options, shortcuts, and keyboard navigation for the Clarify client.   I think Ctrl + Down Arrow within a text box is one of the most useful (and most unknown) shortcuts. Ctrl-F6 is also pretty useful, although I find it difficult to remember (and to type)    

Dovetail Seeker 1.1 Shipped

December 3, 2008 We have added a few bows and ribbons to Dovetail Seeker our handy web based search service for Clarify. We’ve made it easier for search clients, like Dovetail Mobile Agent, and Dovetail Search for Clarify, to page results. Added example code for consuming Seeker’s search services from a .Net client. Better documentation of the search service API. Details Details Here is a copy and paste of our release notes for this version with all the gritty details. Version 1.1.0 Documentation added with information on the Seeker Search Web Service API. Added client-example directory to the installation directory. This directory now contains source code and assemblies for a C# Seeker client. Please view the ReadMe.txt file in that directory for more information. Added new value RequestedNumberOfResults to the search results information returned by the search service. This value reflects the number…

hMailServer: a free email server that’s great for demos and testing

When doing testing or demos, I often need to send and receive email. For example, Dovetail EmailAgent requires a mail server for receiving incoming mail. Dovetail Rulemanager needs a mail server for sending outgoing notifications by email, as well as for sending outgoing email.   When I'm in the office, I could use our corporate mail server (although I don't like to use production systems for testing). If I have internet access, I can use GMail, or another free hosted SMTP/POP3 server. But when I'm on the road, its not uncommon to end up in a conference room somewhere without internet access. So I prefer to have everything I need loaded on my laptop - and this includes a mail server. hMailServer   hMailServer is a free email server that's great for demos and testing. I've been using it for teh last 6 months or…

Improved Case and Solution linking workflow within Dovetail Agent

November 18, 2008 One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough.   This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements.   Making it easier for agents to link solutions and cases would certainly be beneficial. If its hard, they're less likely to do it. So, make it easy.     Dovetail Agent (version 4.0) has simplified the ability to link a solution to one or more cases. Regardless of how you get to a Solution (via Search, Find by ID, or simply opening it from a queue or WIPbin), you can easily link the Solution to one (or more) of your…

Incorporating Dovetail Search into your Case and Solution Workflow within the Clarify Client

An additional customization is provided with Dovetail Search for Clarify that allows Search to be incorporated into your case and solution workflow. For example, from the Case form, clicking the Dovetail Search button will open the Search form, and can search Solutions using the case title. A solution can be opened from the Search results form, and the Link to Case button on the Solution form can be clicked, which will link the solution to the case. Clicking on the Dovetail Search button from the case form: opens the Search form, and automatically executes a search using the case title: Clicking on one of the solutions from the search results opens the Solution form: and then clicking the Link to Case button links the case to the solution. Super easy.