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Yes, it demos well. But is it maintainable?

September 11, 2007 A few years ago we created a couple of products to assist customers in converting their Clarify Classic (thick) client forms and code into our thin-client application. Specifically, fcFormsConverter converted Clarify forms into HTML web pages, and fcCodeConverter converted Clarify's proprietary ClearBasic code into JavaScript or VB6. These two products demo-ed really well.  In a matter of seconds, these applications created decent looking web pages, and the generated code was definitely JavaScript. Wow! Cool! Not so fast there cowboy. Let's take a closer  look at the generated code. The HTML code generated by fcFormsConverter: All elements are absolutely positioned Every element has its own style attribute It lacked any security (privilege class) checking etc... The JavaScript code generated by fcCodeConverter: Doesn't effectively deal with Contextual Objects (what Clarify called their in-memory form variable storage) It had no way of distinguishing server-side…

Technology will not create a customer-centric organization

In a recent destinationCRM article, a couple of Oracle execs say: Transforming your business to a customer-centric organization starts with a CRM-focused services-oriented architecture. I have to disagree. While I concur that well-architected solutions will make it much easier to integrate multiple systems, software architecture will not create a customer-centric organization.A customer-centric organization starts with people and culture. It empowers people to make the right decisions. The culture shifts from a break-fix reactive mode to that of a proactive mindset. It aligns the goals of service, sales, and marketing around the customer.Technology can help achieve these goals. But by itself, it does nothing. There are plenty of technology solutions out there that abide by good SOA practices. Just because a corporation adopts one of these technology solutions, it does not make them customer-centric.There are plenty of organizations that are customer-centric, and they…

Amdocs Clarify Dashboard Tutorial

Static image September 6, 2007 How does the user of the Amdocs Clarify CRM system derive real-time situation analysis – business intelligence for Clarify – in easy-to-use dashboard views of the Clarify data? One simple answer is Dovetail Software’s RuleManager – a drop-in replacement for the Amdocs Rulemanager product – as detailed in the following example.   We’ve been discussing business intelligence for the last few days, the need to integrate data, and the need to present business users with very simple tools. In the background, Dovetail’s own Gary Sherman has written an extensive tutorial showing precisely how to: write business rules to reflect real situations; query the Clarify database for current situations; export the retrieved data as XML; and display them in color-coded graphics in the form of dashboard gauges.   The result is an attractive graphic display, understandable at a glance, showing real-time business intelligence – in this…

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

Good Enough

August 22, 2007 I'm drawn like a moth to a flame when it comes to reading anything written by Seth Godin. One of his recent posts really connected with me: Is Good Enough Enough?  It's so easy to be good enough. To do enough to get by. Enough to satisfy the requirements. Enough to call it "done".  We see "good enough" all the time. Where do you want to be? Striving for remarkable? Changing the rules? Pushing the boundaries? Or satisfied with good enough? No one ever said it was easy. That's what makes it fun.

A great example of usability improving the customer support experience

The 37signals guys point us towards Twitter's use of HelpSpot's Help Desk software:   How do you help your helpdesk/support team give you the best support? Give them the information they need right from the start. I really like the simple, clear, and concise labels: This is what I DIDThis is what I EXPECTED to happenThis is what ACTUALLY happened I'm sure this greatly helps the support team resolve more requests on the first go-round, as opposed to the all-too-common first response having to ask the customer for more information. It's good for the support team, and good for the customer. Nicely done.  

Get out of my way and let me do my work!

August 1, 2007 While working last night, I needed to view a video demo, and I was presented with this message from Windows Media Player:   I hadn't done any updates, or installs, so I have no idea why Media Player decided that I needed to log off and back on. Notice that it's not saying I have to reboot - just log off and back on. All I know is that it completely interrupted my flow. I feel the same way when clicking on a link on a web page and all of a sudden a PDF file starts loading. PDF? WTF? What's wrong with HTML? I'm on a web page! Again, it completely interrupts my flow. As builders of software, we need to be cognizant of this. Are we enabling? Or are we throwing up roadblocks that impede the user's workflow?…

fcSDK Cache files: sometimes more trouble then they're worth

July 30, 2007 One of the features of the fcSDK is its ability to cache frequently-used, rarely-changed data, such as the schema meta-data (ADP tables),  lists (Application Lists, Status codes, User-defined lists), geography data (states, countries, time_zones, currencies), configuration items, and strings. When the fcSDK starts up, it reads all of this data from the database and saves it into memory. In addition, it writes out the data to cache files. The next time the fcSDK starts up, if there are cache files present, it loads the data from the cache files, as opposed to having to go to the database. This improves the performance of the loading of the cache data, as reading from a local file is quicker than loading from a remote database. However, these cache files can often cause trouble. If a piece of cache data is changed in…