What’s new in Dovetail Mobile / Dovetail Agent Lite version 2.1
Dovetail Mobile 2.1 was recently released, so I wanted to to highlight a few of the things that are new in this release.
BTW – did you know you can subscribe to our Dovetail product release RSS feed? This allows you to stay up to date about new releases.
Unified Mobile and Agent Lite
Dovetail Mobile now provides users with 3 view modes: Classic Mobile, Modern Mobile, and Desktop.
- Desktop: for laptops and desktops. Sometimes referred to as Dovetail Agent Lite.
- Modern Mobile: For modern mobile devices like iPhone and Android
- Classic Mobile: Minimalist version for older smart phones
In previous versions, you would pick either Desktop mode or Mobile mode when setting up the application. If you wanted to run Mobile and Agent Lite (Desktop mode) you would need two instances of the application.
Now, all those modes are available in a single instance of the application.
Depending on the type of device/browser you’re using to access the application, you will be automagically presented with the view mode that is most appropriate for you.
So if Sally logs in with her iPhone, and Fred logs in with IE on his laptop, and Marty logs in with his older BlackBerry – they’ll all access the same application, but have a user interface that is styled appropriately for their device.
The core functionality is the same across all three – it’s just the styling that’s different.
Lets look at some examples of how the different view modes look.
Home Page
This is the same home page for the application, just with different styling.
Desktop:
Modern Mobile:
Classic Mobile:
Case Page
Here’s an example of the case page in each mode.
Desktop:
Modern Mobile:
Classic Mobile:
Switch View Mode
You can also switch to a specific mode. At the bottom of both the login and home pages is a link to Switch. It will take you to a Select your view mode page:
Attachments
Attachments can now be uploaded and downloaded.
This works just as you would expect on a laptop or desktop.
On mobile devices, file uploads are dependent on the capabilities of the device. For example, on an iPhone, you can’t upload a file, as there really isn’t a file system to pick a file from.
My Recent Items
The Home page now has a link to My Recent Items
These are items that you recently viewed. Doesn’t matter who owns them, or if they’re opened or closed. This is useful for quickly getting back to an item that you recently viewed. For example, Fred may look at a case that Sally owns, and may need to quickly get back to it in the near future.
Employee Lookup on Assign Page
When assigning a case or subcase, we’ve expanded the employee search to be two separate fields: first name and last name.
Previously, there was just one field, which would search for either first name or last name.
The recent change has made it clearer for users.
Allow solutions to be linked to closed cases
I’ve discussed this workflow and need in a previous post.
Here you can see the new capability:
Summary
That highlights just some of the recent capabilities we’ve added to Dovetail Mobile.
This application has become the primary Dovetail application that we use around here when working on support cases. Having mobile access is great (everyone here has a contemporary smartphone), and the quickness and ease-of-use of the desktop mode make it our preferred app. We still do use Dovetail Agent for more complex tasks (configuring site parts, creating contracts, etc.). Between the functionality that we want to add to the app, coupled with customer requests, the future of this app looks bright.
