What’s New in Dovetail Agent 14
We recently released Dovetail Agent version 14. Here’s a run-down of the highlights.
User-Configurable home page
Users can now set their home page to be any page within the app – such as a queue or a query.
For example, perhaps you’re a manager who doesn’t work cases. In this case, you may wish your home page to be My Workgroup’s Open Items or one of your custom queries.
By default, Home is the same as My Work.
To set your home page, use the s+h keyboard shortcut while you’re on any page in the app. Or set it on the User Preferences page.
Clicking the Home icon (or using the g+h keyboard shortcut) will take you home.
Clicking the My Work icon (or using the g+w keyboard shortcut) will take you to My Work.
From the User Preferences page, you can also set or reset your home page:
Multiple Batch Actions
You can now perform multiple batch actions on a set of items without having to re-query or re-select the items.
For example, I can select a set of cases that are in a queue, accept them all, log a note to all of them, and then close them all – without having to re-query or re-select the set.
Previously, after you accepted the cases, the grid would automatically refresh, and those cases would disappear from the grid (since they’re no longer in the queue).
Now, there’s an “Automatic Grid Refresh” user preference that controls whether the grid is automatically refreshed or not after a batch action is performed.
When disabled, the console grid will not refresh automatically after an action. This allows for multiple actions before refreshing the grid. A Refresh Results button will appear in this situation, allowing you to quickly refresh the grid results when you’re ready to do so.
Email signature for replies and forwards
When performing a reply or forward for an email on a case or subcase, your email signature is automatically included in your reply.
Email addressing
When picking a person to send an email to, the picker previously only searched contacts. It now searches contacts and employees.
For example, here I’m sending an email. In the To text box, I type gary, and I can see it lists Employees and Contacts, and it shows whether that person is an Employee or a Contact:
Log Notes form enhancements
- Include the Notes Type drop-down
- Make the Internal checkbox be more prominent
Expanded use of Canned Responses and Markdown
Canned responses and markdown are now available on the Create Case and Create Subcase pages.
This is useful as a template or checklist for gathering required information as part of the Create workflow.
Note: Canned response variables are NOT resolved on Create Case and Subcase, as there is not a saved case to use for variable substitution.
Toggle the Subcase Tab style
On the Subcase tab on the case page, users can toggle between a grid and a card style listing.
Cards:
Grid:
The user’s preference for this is automatically remembered.
Admin Tasks
The Admin menu item is no longer a menu, but a link that navigates to a new Admin page:
Holidays
There is a new administrative UI for Holidays and Holiday Groups. Holidays can be created, edited, copied, and deleted.
Business Rule properties
There is a new administrative UI for Rule Properties, and rule properties can be created, edited, and deleted.
When creating/editing rule properties, a few new fields are available:
- “For Canned Response” checkbox
- “Description” field
- “Is Function” checkbox, which indicates that this is a custom function-based rule property. I’ll have another blog post soon that dives into function-based rule properties in much more detail.
Rule property picker enhancements
- When using the rule property picker (for Canned Responses or Task Manager), the picker now includes the description. This allows for more details to be presented to end users about what these properties actually are.
- When using the rule property picker for Canned Responses, only show those marked as “For Canned Response”. This simplifies the picker options, removing items that don’t make sense in this context, and those that shouldn’t be used within a canned response (such as objids).
Business Calendars and Holidays
Business calendars now support holidays.
When picking a business calendar for a site, you can:
- pick a holiday group (optional – a holiday group is not required)
- set the effective date
The Calendar page shows the details of the work hours and the holidays:
Holidays and Rulemanager
Dovetail Rulemanager version 2.2 adds support for holidays in business calendars. This allows for excluding holidays when calculating business rule action times, SLAs, etc.
So you can create holidays, and set these holidays as part of your site calendars within Dovetail Agent.
Then Dovetail Rulemanager (v2.2 or higher) will honor those.
Download query results honors user’s individual settings
When downloading a set of query results (in either CSV or Excel format), the download now honors your individual settings for that query.
If you re-ordered columns in your query – the download will have this same order.
If you’ve hidden columns in your query – the download will not show those columns.
History Item Privileges
The visibility of individual items within case/subcase history can now be controlled based on user privileges.
For example, you may wish to hide the Business Rule Action items from normal users, and only show those to Administrators.
This is controlled using the history.config file.
Examples:
<!-- Hide the business rule action items (activity code 8500) from anyone without the Admin privilege --> <addPrivilegePolicy actCode="8500" objectType="Case" privilege="Admin"/> <!-- Hide the Modify history item on Cases for all users --> <addPrivilegePolicy actCode="1500" objectType="Case" privilege="none"/>
Query Facet Privileges
The addFacet element in filter configuration files now supports the requiresPrivilege attribute, allowing for limiting use of this facet to certain privileges.
For example, I could only allow my power users to query and filter cases based on activity log fields.
For more details on queries and facets, check out my post on Configurable and Customizable Queries in Dovetail Agent.
Summary
There’s a bunch of cool stuff in this release. Many of these items were enhancements submitted directly by customers.
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 14 documentation.
If you want to learn more, or want to see a demo of Agent in action – just drop me a line or give me a call – I’m always happy to show off our applications!
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