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CRM Thrives on Open Standards

Static image February 1, 2007 Through all of its evolution, Dovetail Software’s family of CRM products has embraced open standards in the process of bringing extensibility to Clarify’s proprietary code. Open-standard scripting languages such as JavaScript simplify and energize extension and integration throughout the enterprise computing environment. These languages are readily recognized by many applications, and freely employed by in-house IT departments.   Standards sometimes arise first, often from a single developer or project, and afterwards get the seal of approval of a trusted authority that enables all developers to embrace the technology. This happened with JavaScript, created initially by Netscape. The same thing is happening now with Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) specification, which it is currently offering for ISO standardization.   Other times, standards have to be created. This is occurring now in the CRM environment as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) continues its evolution: suggested standards begin to be discussed, and standards already accepted are…

Manually setup Dovetail WebServices on Windows 2003 Server

January 30, 2007 We had a customer who needs to be able to manually setup our WebServices under IIS6 so I thought it would be best to share this with everyone. This guide will take you through setting up a virtual web directory under IIS version 6 on Windows Server 2003. It will also show you how to set the security on your files to make sure the web service will work. You will need to have Dovetail SDK installed on the target machine. Note: The installer can automatically setup WebServices. The goal of this post is to outline the manually steps that will reproduce what the installer does automatically. You will also need to have the web application role setup on the Windows 2003 server. Bring up IIS Manager. Right click on Default Web Site Click on New and select the Virtual…

Hello

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.

Fog Creek Copilot 2.0

January 26, 2007 Fog Creek released version 2.0 of their very rockin Copilot application today. Congrats to the team at Fog Creek! For those that don't know, Copilot is a remote assistance application that allows one person remotely take over another computer. The Copilot website has a good overview. I've used this app a few times over the last year. I've used it to help my parents out on their home machine (they live a thousand miles away), and I've also used it to assist some of our remote Dovetail employees. Each time I've used, it's worked perfectly. It always installs simply, and connects without issue. To put it simply: it just works! That's what software is supposed to do - just work. The $10 price was so worth it. It would have taken me hours on the phone with my Dad to…

Dell service tech: I've never heard those beeps before

January 24, 2007 We had one of our developer's workstations fail on startup this week. Upon powering on, it would emit a series of beeps, and then power down.We took note of the series of beeps: 4 beeps, pause, 4 beeps, pause, 4 beeps.A call into Dell support, explain the problem, and they say they've never heard of that sequence of beeps before, so they don't know what that means. The developer even put his cell phone up to the computer and powered the PC on, so that the phone support person could hear the beeps for himself. It was very comical to observe.The phone support person schedules an onsite technician for the next day, but lets us know that he'll only be bringing enough parts to get to the BIOS screen. Additional parts may be necessary beyond that, but he won't have them…

Too many angle brackets make my head hurt

January 23, 2007   Saw this code sample on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM blog, listed under Customizing CRM made easy:     var xmlhttp = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");   xmlhttp.open("POST", serverUrl + "/crmservice.asmx", false);   xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8") ;   xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("SOAPAction", "http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/WebServices/RetrieveMultiple") ;   xmlhttp.send("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>"+"\n\n"+"<soap:Envelope"+ ' xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"'+ ' xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"'+ ' xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">'+ ' <soap:Body>' + ' <query xmlns:q1=http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Query’ + ‘ xsi:type="q1:QueryExpression" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/WebServices">'+ ' <q1:EntityName>pricelevel</q1:EntityName>'+ ' <q1:ColumnSet xsi:type="q1:ColumnSet">'+ ' <q1:Attributes>'+ ' <q1:Attribute>pricelevelid</q1:Attribute>'+ ' <q1:Attribute>name</q1:Attribute>'+ ' </q1:Attributes>'+ ' </q1:ColumnSet>'+ ' <q1:Distinct>false</q1:Distinct>'+ ' <q1:LinkEntities>'+ ' <q1:LinkEntity>'+ ' <q1:LinkFromAttributeName>pricelevelid</q1:LinkFromAttributeName>'+ ' <q1:LinkFromEntityName>pricelevel</q1:LinkFromEntityName>'+ ' <q1:LinkToEntityName>account</q1:LinkToEntityName>'+ ' <q1:LinkToAttributeName>defaultpricelevelid</q1:LinkToAttributeName>'+ ' <q1:JoinOperator>Inner</q1:JoinOperator>'+ ' <q1:LinkCriteria>'+ ' <q1:FilterOperator>And</q1:FilterOperator>'+ ' <q1:Conditions>'+ ' <q1:Condition>'+ ' <q1:AttributeName>accountid</q1:AttributeName>'+ ' <q1:Operator>Equal</q1:Operator>'+ ' <q1:Values>'+ ' <q1:Value xmlns:q2="http://microsoft.com/wsdl/types/"'+ ' xsi:type="q2:guid">' + id + ' </q1:Value>'+ ' </q1:Values>'+ '</q1:Condition>'+ ' </q1:Conditions>'+ '</q1:LinkCriteria>'+ ' </q1:LinkEntity>'+ ' </q1:LinkEntities>'+ ' </query>'+ ' </soap:Body>'+ ' </soap:Envelope>') ;   var result = xmlhttp.responseXML.xml;       I don't…

Ubiquitous language is for all of us, not just the geeky developers

January 22, 2007 One of the concepts used in Domain Driven Design is Ubiquitous Language. What this essentially means is that everyone involved in the project uses the same terms to describe the system. And by everyone, we do mean everyone: developers, testers, business users, writers, sales, marketing, etc. When we all talk the same language, to each other, and to our customers, it helps us break down communication barriers. Like other agile ideas, we need to constantly be inspecting our language, and adapting, so that our communication continues to improve. We need to inspect for terms that are confusing and unclear, and adapt our language (spoken, written, or coded) to continuously improve.The technical team here at Dovetail Software tries hard to keep our language ubiquitous, so whether it's a developer, a writer, or a tester, we use the same words, which makes a big difference…

Automated Testing benefits more than just the tech team

January 19, 2007  We've made a fair number of process changes here at Dovetail over the last year, and one of them is really tightning up our automated testing. We used to have some automated tests, that we ran sometimes, and we were happy to have that. But over the last year we've made a big push towards solid continuous integration and automated testing, where hundreds upon hundreds of tests get run on every code check-in, including fast running unit tests, and slower running integration tests. In addition to these developer tests, we've also automated most of our customer acceptance tests, which typically falls into the realm of our software testing group. Towards the end of last year, we made strides towards having customer acceptance tests written before development work. That way everyone knew when a story was completed - when it passed the customer's test, which the customer defined even before any coding work…

Yank Notifications via Email

January 16, 2007 Clarify's Business Rules + RuleManager is a pretty robust and generic event processing system. Admins/BAs configure rules for who to notify and when, and each user can even decide how they want to be notified (email, pager, within the app itself (the Integrated Notifier), etc.). Most of us here at Dovetail use email as our notification preference. I don't believe any of us the integrated Notifier.There has always been one desired business rule that I couldn't make work with the existing Clarify infrastructure - yank notifications by email.Note: in later versions of Clarify, Yank has been renamed to Retrieve. After many years of snickering over the term Yank, it's just now a natural part of my vocabulary.  But I digress...For example, if someone yanks a case from me, I would like to get notified that it happened. And I want the notification to…