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Moving the Dovetail Twitter Integration To Jabber/XMPP

April 22, 2008 Quickly after creating a Twitter Integration with Dovetail I ran into rate limiting issues using Twitter's API. Twitter currently only allows 70 requests per hour. Here is their guidance... If you are developing an application that requires more frequent requests to the Twitter API, please contact us and we'll see what we can do.  We maintain a white list of known-good screen names who have high-volume API needs.  We also suggest researching Jabber/XMPP if your application needs to deliver a near-realtime experience (for example, a bot that replies to direct messages). I emailed Twitter support asking nicely for higher volume API usage but still haven't gotten a response. Then I realized that if we want to release this Dovetail/Twitter integration to our customers we it need to work within the rate limiting guidelines, so I listened to Twitter's guidance and…

Pairing Your Twitter Account With a Jabber Client

Twitter will send direct messages and updates for friends you follow who have notifications turned on to a device. Cool. Better yet a device can be a mobile phone (SMS) or an Instant Messaging account. The goal of this post is to show how to sending and receive messages to Twitter using a Jabber device. To do this we will be using the excellent IM client Digsby which it turns out has excellent Jabber support. Here is what we will be doing. Creating a Jabber ID in Digsby. Adding the Twitter Jabber ID as a contact for your new Jabber ID. Pair your new Jabber ID with your Twitter account. Testing it out. Creating a Jabber ID To create a Jabber ID using Digsby click on Add IM Account in your preferences. Fill in the Jabber Account form and one…

Dovetail knows Clarify as good as, if not better than, Clarify

April 18, 2008 Over on IT toolbox, a recent post was inquiring about people's experience of dealing with Dovetail. One of our customers responded: we were a customer of theirs for about 2 years (purchased Super Email Clerk)...we moved on to a different package at the end of those two years, so we did not need them. I did Clarify work from version 5 through version 12 (from 1997 - 2004) on various projects, so my Clarify experience is pretty decent. Everything I have heard about FC/Dovetail has been solid. Their people know Clarify, the data model, the architecture as good if not better than some of the folks at Clarify/Amdocs. The founders were clarify employees at one point. I think it also speaks a lot that they are small, dependent on this software, and through it all, they are still around -…

Creating A Twitter Integration

April 15, 2008 I have been doing some work using Twitter as a notification mechanism for case events taking place in Dovetail CRM. I also wanted to expose an API of sorts driven by Twitter direct messages which would allow support agents to work on cases via Twitter. I created a twitter account for Dovetail and went crazy. To the right is a screen shot of my favorite twitter client showing me being notified of a case created by a customer and accepting it via Twitter. This goal of this post is a brain dump what I have learned so far on my journey into Twitterland. Twitter? - what is this Twitter you speak of Twitter is a micro-blogging service on which you can post short messages called tweets. People usually post what they are up to, thinking about, and sadly what clothing…

My love for Twitter continues

April 14, 2008 My love for Twitter continues. Or, more precisely, my love of what people are doing with Twitter.The CEO of Zappos wants to talk to more customers - so what does he do?  - He selects one of his random followers from Twitter for a free trip to Vegas to meet with him! That rocks!DataGrid offers a $350 rebate to its first 100 followers.Sarah, over at the ReadWriteWeb has a good article on Customer Service via Twitter. What else did I see/learn on Twitter today?Scoble comments that Best Buy is doing some awesome things with social media. Looking to hearing more on this. Since he sat next to Michele Azar, Best Buy VP of Internet Growth, I'm sure we will. (Best Buy is one of our customers, hence the interest)Found out about SalesForce for GoogleAppsGot inspired by the Brains on Fire customer…

Other Cool Tools

I learned about a couple of other cool tools from J.P. Boodhoo last week, and thought I would pass them along.   Console2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/ This is a replacement for the CMD shell. It is a tabbed window, and each tab can be defined as a different shell process.   Unlocker http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ I just want to delete that folder... Grrrr... here comes Unlocker to the Rescue! Unlocker will pop up after you close the annoying pop-up window, and show you what programs have the file locked, and give you the option to easily free the file. Very nice UI to give you the control that you want (and need)!

Goodbye SlickRun! …

  ... and hello Launchy. This is a minor replacement, but makes life at the keyboard even easier. Like a helpful side-kick, you can train Launchy to open any program with just a few shortcuts. This is the same as SlickRun, but without the magic keyword setup.   You can easily change the configuration to use any hot-key combination for popping up Launchy, then just start typing the name of the program you are trying to launch. If you need to browse for it, it will help you traverse down the folder trees as you type folder names and hit tab for auto-completion.   I am using it like this so far: vs - Visual Studio ue - UltraEdit ff - fireFox fl - Flare ie - Internet Explorer dt - http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/ iis - IIS Console     Other cool stuff found…

FreshBooks roadtrip: a great example of getting personal with customers

April 11, 2008 Becky at the Customers Rock! blog recently detailed the FreshBooks roadtrip, which is a great example of how a company can stay connected with its customers. I love this: This was not a product roadshow.  This was a listening tour. I also really like how they're using face-to-face conversations, but also expanding their conversations using a company blog, a roadtrip blog, and Twitter. Awesome.

Digsby

April 10, 2008 I don't do too much Instant Messaging (IM) lately. Twitter and Campfire have replaced a lot of what I used to use IM for. That said IM is not dead.   I still need to have private conversations with people that are not into Twitter or hanging out around my team's campfire. I have contacts across many different IM formats. I have been using Trillian for years and found that while it works the UI is clunky and their new version Astra is taking forever to get out the door. Along comes Digsby and I am in love.       Digsby is intuitive to configure and supports a plethora of Instant Message formats, Email protocols, and Social Networks.          Only thing I see missing is IRC and Campfire support.   What I really like about Digsby is their customer aware web site. The download and install experience flows…

The world's atwitter with Twitter

March 27, 2008 I've been using Twitter a lot lately. For the un-initiated, Twitter is basically micro-blogging. Wikipedia has more details. Or check out a Newbie's guide to Twitter.You can follow me on Twitter.There's many opinions on Twitter, including:"I don't get it""This is brilliant""This seems stupid"Twitter is very new, and all of its usefulness and power is still in its infancy.For me, its super exciting to see how companies are connecting with customers via Twitter - they're Joining the Conversation.What companies? Here's just a few:JetBlueSalesForce.comSouthwestflickrThat rocks!More discussions on companies using TwitterJackie Huba (of Citizens Marketes fame, and also a recent Austin transplant) has a few example of How companies connect using Twitter.Ike Pigott, who specializes in crisis communication, discusses how the American Red Cross is using Twitter as part of their Safe and Well Program.Companies using Twitter as an always available help request…