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Tag: Clarify

Testing the Waters: Understanding the Customer

undertsanding the customer
June 10, 2016 What We Do and Understanding the CustomerTesting the waters, as a marketer, can be tenuous. Depending on marketing campaigns, we run the risk of boring our intended audience or annoying them. Over the years, I have come to understand that each effort can be a good effort, as it may reach just the person it was intended to reach. But, there is also the risk of over-saturation. The most important thing, for me, as a marketer and as someone who truly believes in our product and cares about our company, is to know the customer.Knowing the Customer - YOUR CustomerIt isn't enough to know who the customer is - their name, rank, and serial number. It isn't enough to know what they do. It isn't nearly enough to know what our competitors do when it comes to their own marketing…

What’s New in Dovetail Agent 6

June 24, 2015 This week we released Dovetail Agent version 6. Here’s a quick rundown of the major changes.   Faster all around We’ve improved performance throughout the application, both on the front and back-end. On the back-end, we’ve upgraded our major infrastructure components (including FUBU MVC, StructureMap, and Dovetail SDK), which improves the application startup time, as well as improves the time to process every request. We’ve also made improvements to the SQL generation module, which improves the performance of many database queries. In addition, queries are no longer executed on items without any relevant filters, which means fewer queries and better overall performance. On the front-end, Dovetail Agent is now a true SPA (Single Page Application), which means navigating through the application is much faster. There are less requests from the client to the server, and less data (scripts, templates, css,…

Goodbye ClarifyToolbox

April 27, 2015 A few years ago, I created ClarifyToolbox.com, which was a a repository of apps, code snippets, add-ons, and APIs for the Clarify environment. It was a little experiment of my own making to try and share some resources with the community, and also a chance for me to play with Drupal. It just didn’t get the traffic or interest anticipated, and it was costing me money out of my own pocket every month, so it’s now shut down. I still own the domain. If someone in the community is interested in it, let me know.

Clarify IT Toolbox group being deactivated?

February 24, 2015 I received an email today from IT Toolbox: Based on recent member feedback, the following groups will be deactivated:ACT!ClarifySalesLogixYou are currently a member of one or more of these groups. You can ask or reply to new threads in CRM - General Discussions. I’m definitely saddened by this – I’ve shared a lot of information there, and learned a lot as well.  We’ll see how the Clarify community takes to the CRM - General Discussions list instead. I’m guessing that it’s due to the lack of activity on the Clarify list. Looking at the number of messages per month, the decline is pretty obvious. Quite the decline from its heyday in the early 2000s. My first post to that group was back in January of 2001. Over 14 years ago – crazy! What about the archives? I sent an email…

Smarter Pickers

Throughout our application, we use “pickers” for selecting items. For example, we use a picker for queues when dispatching a case: a picker for contacts when creating a case: and a picker for the installed part on a case: For a small list of items (lets say < 100), such as a list of queues, we’ll just show the user all of the available items straight-away. The user can scroll to see them all, or start typing and the list will be filtered in place. When there are a large number of items, such as a list of contacts when creating a case, which can be thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions, we make the user type to start the search process. There’s no way we could retrieve millions of contacts from the database and show them to the…

More Case History enhancements in Dovetail Agent

February 17, 2015 Last spring I posted about some of the enhancements we’ve made to the case history in Dovetail Agent. Over the last few releases, we’ve also made more improvements that we think make it even better.  Images File attachments that are images are now shown inline. They’re constrained to a maximum size, to maintain readability. Clicking on an image opens it in a lightbox, and in a larger format when necessary. Example: Ordering In my previous post, I mentioned that we displayed the case history in reverse chronological order – with the newest entries at the top, similar to many current social apps (facebook, twitter, etc.). Based on customer feedback, we added an additional option here. Users can now choose the order – either chronological or reverse chronological. And the user’s preference is automatically remembered. This gives each user more control…

Broadcasts in Dovetail Agent

February 5, 2015 One of the newer features in Dovetail Agent is broadcasts. A broadcast is used to communicate a message to all users. Broadcasts appear in the user's notification drawer - along with Notifier messages (such as from business rules). Notice the megaphone icon which helps identify it as a broadcast. Examples What are a few examples of where you might use broadcasts? The system will be going down tonight at 5:00 PM for maintenance. If a customer calls about the special holiday promotion, here's what you need to know. This app has been updated to a new version. Outgoing shipments will be delayed because of the snow storm. Or whatever other message you want to send to your users. Properties Broadcast messages are made up of: Title - a brief summary of the message, similar to an email subject Message body…

Notifications in Dovetail Agent

February 2, 2015 When a business rule fires, most of the time the result is a notification to one or more users. There's a few common ways a user can get notified - email, pager, sms/text messages, and the "notifier". Notifier means that the user gets a notification within the application itself. In the Clarify Classic Client, there is a Notifier form (Desktop - Notifier) where messages are displayed. Notify Server On the back end, Clarify uses  a Notifier service/daemon, commonly referred to as the Notify Server. The Clarify Client communicates with the Notifier service using a Windows socket connection. This is notoriously buggy. It wouldn't always connect, the connection would drop, messages would get lost, etc. Often, the Notifier service would think it delivered a message to the client, and then delete the message from the database. If it didn't actually get…

ThrowbackThursday: First Choice Giveaway – Clarify User Group 1998

January 29, 2015 Stumbled across a copy of a disk that we (when we were First Choice Software) gave away at the 1998 Clarify User Group.   No idea what’s on it, as I don’t have a 3.5” disk drive kicking around anymore. In case you kids have no idea what the hell that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#3.C2.BD-inch_floppy_disk Pretty cool that we’ve been giving away free software to the Clarify community for close to two decades now.

Commitment Templates

January 28, 2015 In our last episode, we looked at Commitments in Dovetail Agent. When a commitment expires, or is about to expire, the system will notify the user. Rulemanager is what sends out the notification, and the content of the notification message is defined by the commitment templates. Lets take a look at these templates, and see how we can make them better. Templates There are two templates in the system that are used for commitments: Commitment and Warning. These are stored in table_com_tmplte. With the commitment enhancements that we’ve made to Dovetail Agent, we can also enhance the commitment templates to provide more information and context. Commitment Template Here’s the commitment template we provide with Dovetail Agent.  They’re simply DAT files that you import using dataex or DIET. The interesting part of the template is really the action field: RE: Commitment…