What’s New in Dovetail Agent 10
We recently released Dovetail Agent version 10. Or Dovetail Agent X, for you roman-numeral types.
Here’s a quick rundown of the major changes.
Dovetail Task Manager
Dovetail Task Manager is a new optional module that allows actions to occur automatically when a task set is selected from a case.
The most common action is creating a subcase.
For example, when the New Employee Task Set is run:
- Create a General subcase for setting up the employee’s network account and dispatch to the Network queue.
- Create an Administrative subcase for ordering business cards and assign to a specific employee.
- Create a General subcase for creating the user’s account in the CRM system, and dispatch to a queue based on auto-destination rules.
Dovetail Agent can work with either Clarify Task Manager or Dovetail Task Manager. No surprise, we recommend using Dovetail Task Manager!
Dovetail Task Manager is also extensible using customization, allowing it to perform other actions, within the Clarify/Dovetail system itself, or even as a mechanism for integrating with other systems.
The entire Dovetail Task Manager process spans multiple products:
- Dovetail Agent – for creating tasks and task sets, and for executing a task set from a case
- Dovetail Admin – for creating the business rule that fires when a task set is executed.
- Dovetail Rulemanager – which executes the business rule, and sends a message to Dovetail Carrier
- Dovetail Carrier – which receives the message from Rulemanager, and processes the tasks.
I’ll be covering Task Manager in much more detail in some upcoming posts.
Case More Info Tab
There is a new More Info tab on the Case Page:
This tab contains:
- Alternate Contact information for the case
- CC list for the case
- Part and Contract detailed information
Along with this, we’ve also simplified the amount of part and contract information shown in the case left sidebar. The sidebar only shows the main information (and it links to the part and contract pages), and additional information is shown on the More Info tab.
Site – Calendars
Site page now has a Calendars tab, showing business calendars for this site.
Users can add and remove calendars from a site.
Business Calendars
A new Calendar page, showing details of a business calendar
Note: Calendars are currently read-only in Dovetail Agent. They can be created/edited from within Dovetail Admin. In the future, they will be editable within Agent.
Site – Connections
The Site page now has a Connections tab, showing connections for this site. Connections used to be called Modems in Clarify.
From this tab, users can create, edit, and delete connections.
Compare to the old Modem form within the Clarify Classic Client:
Differences:
- We’ve added an Address field, which could be an IP address, URL, etc.
- We’re not showing the Speed and Parity drop-downs.
- The Notes field supports markdown for richly formatted text.
Admin Menu
We’ve added a new Admin top-level application menu.
Broadcasts, Cache, and User Sessions menu items have been moved to this new Admin menu.
This menu also contains the new Task Manager menu item.
Site Tabs Configuration
Site tabs (other than the Contacts tab) can be enabled/disabled easily via application settings.
By default, all tabs are shown:
By using configuration, we can quickly “turn off” tabs that we don’t want.
For example, if I disable all of the site tabs (other than contacts) using app settings:
<add key=”SiteSitePartsTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteFlashesTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteCCTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteRecentCasesTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteSupportTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteChildSitesTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteCalendarsTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteContractsTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
<add key=”SiteConnectionsTab.FeatureEnabled” value=”false”/>
then we get this:
This makes it easy to quickly hide certain functionality without any code customizations.
Summary
There’s also a number of minor changes, assorted bug fixes, and some changes that are specific to developers.
For a complete list of enhancements and fixes, refer to the What’s New section in the Agent 10 documentation.