REQUEST A DEMO

Tag: clarify amdocs

Encode URLs with ClearBasic

June 23, 2008 At Dovetail one of the things we sell is Clarify Helpdesk support. This means that customers having problems with Clarify Client can get support when they run into issues. We had an interesting case recently that I thought would be good to share with the community.   Under the hood Clarify Client uses a variant of Visual Basic called ClearBasic which makes the behavior of their windows application customizable via scriptability. Using ClearBasic, Clarify developers can modify the script used behind any of the forms in the Clarify Client application. We have a customer that is integrating one of their Clarify Client forms with another enterprise application using HTTP GET Requests. They ran into a problem with GET requests getting truncated when special characters were present in the request URL. When constructing HTTP GET requests parameters you should UrlEncode the value of each parameter.…

Clarify 6 – still running after all these years

April 22, 2008 I'm currently working with a customer who is running Clarify version 6. Not Amdocs CRM6, but Clarify version 6, or as the marketing brainiacs tagged it - CFO98 (Clarify Front Office 98). I'm amazed that they're still running a 10 year old enterprise application, and haven't upgraded at all in 10 years. On the other hand, it speaks to the power of the system that it continues to work and provide value, despite its age. They're now working with us, so that they can upgrade their database to something more current (Oracle 10g), and they're looking into using out toolset (SchemaEditor, ArchiveManager, fcSDK, BOLT, etc.) so that they can continue to reap value out of their system. Pretty cool.

Dovetail knows Clarify as good as, if not better than, Clarify

April 18, 2008 Over on IT toolbox, a recent post was inquiring about people's experience of dealing with Dovetail. One of our customers responded: we were a customer of theirs for about 2 years (purchased Super Email Clerk)...we moved on to a different package at the end of those two years, so we did not need them. I did Clarify work from version 5 through version 12 (from 1997 - 2004) on various projects, so my Clarify experience is pretty decent. Everything I have heard about FC/Dovetail has been solid. Their people know Clarify, the data model, the architecture as good if not better than some of the folks at Clarify/Amdocs. The founders were clarify employees at one point. I think it also speaks a lot that they are small, dependent on this software, and through it all, they are still around -…

A few of my common utilities

March 20, 2008 Whenever I have to do something more than a few times, I like to make a shortcut or a utility for it. I have all of these in my c:\bin directory, and I have my system path set to include c:\bin.  These utilities mean that I don't have to think about a lot of heavy syntax most of the time.   For example, to import a DAT file into my database, rather than using:   c:\bin\diet.exe -license MyDietLicenseKey -user_name sa -password sa -db_server . -db_name dovetail -import file.dat -sqllog sql.log     I just have to use:   import dovetail file.dat     Much easier to remember, and much easier and quicker to type.   Most of these are geared towards running on my development system, which is primarily SQL Server running onlocalhost with an sa password of sa.   Here's a few common…

Expanding text boxes, font-sizing, and readability within Clarify

February 11, 2008 While talking with a customer recently, they were showing off a "feature" that they had implemented. Whenever they added a note to a case, they have some ClearBasic code that automatically uppercases the entire text of the note before saving it to the database. I shuddered. They asked me if we could do this in our DovetailAgent application. I said Yes, we can, but No, I won't do it. I think he was a bit shocked.Why won't I do this? Because that's coupling your content to its presentation. There's already been much written on this topic, so I won't expand on it here.After I dug into it a bit more with the customer, it turns out that the reason they did this was because the case history is hard to read, and they felt that uppercasing all the text made…

Clarify on an iPhone

January 31, 2008 AppSwing looks to have created their own front end for Clarify, geared for iPhone users. The functionality is limited, but it looks interesting. Although with my fat fingers, I would have a hard time typing in case notes on the iPhone "keyboard". They have a video that shows it in action. Slick.

An RSS feed for Dovetail Recent Knowledgebase Articles, courtesy of Dapper and Yahoo Pipes

December 19, 2007 We publish our knowledgebase articles online: http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/resources/knowledgeBase.aspx. We use the Dovetail SDK to query the solutions in our Clarify/Dovetail database and build the HTML pages.In addition, we have a page that lists the latest 20 articles: http://support.dovetailsoftware.com/selfservice/solutions/recentThis is nice, but it means that one would have to visit the web page to see any new articles.I would like to be notified when new articles are added. Between email spam and Microsoft Outlook, my faith in (and enjoyment of) email is dwindling on a daily basis. But my love of RSS feeds and Google Reader continues to grow. So, how can I get new KB articles pushed to me by RSS?One way would be to go back to our dev team and have them add an RSS feed for that page. Could be done. Not too hard. But that would take…

Auto-Destination Rules have nothing to do with RuleManager

December 11, 2007 A very common misconception is that RuleManager is responsible for evaluating Auto-Destination rules. Perhaps it's because both contain the word "rule". Not sure. Let's all say it together: Auto-Destination Rules have nothing to do with RuleManager. Nicely done. OK, now, let's explore auto-destination rules in more detail.What's an Auto-Destination Rule?An auto-destination rule is a mechanism for assisting in the routing of a workflow object  (such as a case) to the correct place.From the Clarify documentation:If your organization is large and uses many queues, auto-destination helps reduce the time a user spends searching for the right queue.Example (in plain English):When dispatching a case with a case type of New Employee, then the case should be routed to the New Employee queue.Example (in Clarify Syntax):OBJECT TYPE="rule", NAME="rule1" UNIQUE_FIELD = "title,operation"     FIELDS         title = "Case";         operation = "DISPATCH";         rule_text…

Are Queue Supervisors also Queue Members?

December 10, 2007   We've recently had a couple questions from customers in regards to queue members and supervisors. There is definitely some weirdness here, so hopefully this post will clear up a little confusion.   In Clarify, there are two relations from queue to user: queue2user, a ManyToMany relation, which is the users assigned to the queue queue_supvr2user, a ManyToMany relation, which is the users supervising the queue Queue Membership in the Clarify UI   In the Clarify Classic Client, when you add a user as a supervisor, you see the user listed only as a supervisor.   For example, here I just added the user "texas" as a supervisor of the WebSupport queue. Notice that he shows up in the Supervisors list, but not in the Members list. As expected. Notice there are only two queue members listed.   Queue Membership…