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Tag: customization

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent (part 2)

July 15, 2010 This is the second installment of a series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. The plan was for this post to cover converting Clarify Forms into Dovetail Agent/Admin pages. That is a great idea, but a very ambitious goal for a single post. I will be making a few posts along this line instead, trying to highlight the best practices and throw in a good amount of example code to help pave the way for such a conversion.   The example conversion of Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin has a lot of possibilities for things to talk about. There are all kinds of controls used on the main form: a filtered grid, multiple tabs, checkboxes, text boxes, dropdowns,…

Converting from Clarify Desktop to Dovetail Agent

July 12, 2010 This is the first installment of a new series of posts on migrating applications/enhancements from the Clarify desktop application to Dovetail Agent features. There are usually a few components involved – schema changes, customized forms, and custom code – that all need to be converted in some form or fashion. For this series of posts, I will be migrating the Employee Manager Utility (EMU) from a Clarify desktop integration to a new feature for Dovetail Agent and Dovetail Admin. EMU is part of the Administration Series, and was last modified when Dovetail Software was still known as First Choice Software. The first things to do is to examine the Employee Manager Utility product. EMU is an administration tool that allows an administrator to associate employee properties (such as queues, office location, supervisor, and resource configuration) to a workgroup. New employees…

Solution Workflow

April 14, 2010 When we talk about workflow within our CRM systems, we commonly talk about cases, subcases, part requests, etc. But every queueable object within our Clarify/Dovetail system can have its own workflow. Including Solutions. Many people don’t think about a workflow around their knowledge. I wanted to touch on this, and show an example of a business process, or a workflow, for Solutions. Quick recap: what is a Solution? A Solution is a description of a known problem with one or more workarounds and/or resolutions. It is a piece of re-usable knowledge. Some refer to it as a KB or KnowledgeBase article. Here’s what a Solution looks like within DovetailAgent: Pretty simple. An ID number, a title, a status, a description of the problem, and one or more workarounds/resolutions. Simple Workflow Here’s an example of a simple workflow for a Solution:…

Displaying text using a fixed width font in the Clarify Client

September 2, 2009   We received a request recently about how to deal with some text in the system that was formatted using a fixed width font.   For example, a customer might send in an email that contained some text that was laid out in a nicely formatted table structure. Such as this:   5.17637 |-----+-----+--------------+----------+--+-------+----------+-----+-----| | | JD00| firma ip | gumpendor| 1| Wien | Empfänger| fa. | 05.0| | | 0010| österreich | ferstr. | 0| | verzogen | nich| 8.20| | 5239| 4300| gmbh - | 19-21 | 6| | | t | 09| | 1478| 0140| | | 0| | | mehr| | | | 6959| | | | | | da!!| | | | 22 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----+-----+--------------+----------+--+-------+----------+-----+-----|     But,…

How to notify additional people when a commitment expires

February 26, 2009 I was talking to a customer today, and they asked me about how to notify additional people when a commitment expires. For example, if a support agent makes a commitment to call the customer back at 4:00, but the agent goes home, we want to notify others within the department, so that someone else can call back the customer. When the commitment expires, Rulemanager uses a template to notify the commitment owner that the commitment has been missed. One way to accomplish this task is by customizing this commitment template. Baseline Commitment Template The baseline commitment template can be found with the following SQL: select * from table_com_tmplte where title = 'Commitment' You can also extract it using Dovetail ArchiveManager (or dataex) using a directives file that looks like: NO_EXPORT OBJECT ALL; EXPORT OBJECT com_tmplte   UNIQUE_FIELD=title   WHERE "title…

A feed for new Knowledgebase Articles

February 10, 2009 Kevin has put together an RSS feed for our most recent knowledgebase articles. The feed can be subscribed to using a feed reader (such as Google Reader), and any new articles will be delivered to you. Very cool. We eat our own dogfood here, meaning we use our Dovetail/Clarify system for our customer support team - including the knowledgebase (solutions). Being kept informed about new solutions is good for our support staff, but also for other members of our team - including Sales Engineers, the Product and Development teams, etc - as well as our customers who live in our products every day.  While I really like this specific example, I think the general idea of syndicating data from your Clarify/Dovetail system is totally rockin. Combine the code that Kevin laid out in his post, along with some Dovetail SDK…

45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience

January 19, 2009 Smashing Magazine has a list of 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience There's some cool ideas in there. The sortable lists technique would be useful for Drop-Down list management in DovetailAdmin. I also like the Scrollable HTML table plugin - which keeps the header row visible when scrolling through a long table.

Announcing a New Product Release…

January 12, 2009 This is always a good sign for a software company, and here at Dovetail Software this has just become an easier task. It is important for us to get the news about a new product release to our customers. By automating some of the steps in this task, we can get the information to the customer faster, and also add some business value to the process. Now when a new release is ready, we can use the new Product Announcement tool to prepare the message for our customers. Opening this application from within our in-house version of Dovetail Agent, we can see a list of all of our products that are currently under contract with any of our customers. Clicking on one of the products will retrieve all of the customers under contract, and show a second grid filled with…

Improving case history

The case history within Clarify has always been a bit of a sore spot with users for a long time. It was good - in that it made it easy to quickly review the details of the case. But, it did have its issues: Its just one giant text blob. You have no control over the formatting. Its in chronological order. Sometimes this is OK, but typically you scroll to the bottom to read the most recent activity. You don't have control over the timestamp format (DD/MM/YY vs. MM/DD/YY, as an example). The timezone of the timestamp isn't clear. It isn't easy to hide/remove certain entries. Its limited to 32K. If the case history his its 32K limit, users would see this message: THIS FIELD HAS EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. THE ABOVE ENTRY MAY HAVE BEEN TRUNCATED. PLEASE REFER TO…