April 10, 2017
"Modernize Your Clarify Experience" For years, we have been helping Amdocs Clarify customers / users update or modernize their Clarify experience, which in turn updates the experience of their own customers. We think it's important enough to keep at it. We want to improve your experience and that of your customer. We have a total system approach to modernizing Clarify that addresses all aspects of the system from the user experience and its customization framework to the back-end server applications and security. Believe it our not, we make it possible to completely overhaul the system. Or we can simply solve just one or two particular issues. Dovetail allows you to infuse modern technologies to breathe new life into your Clarify system through expanded methods of deployment, increased functionality, simplified customization and administration, and lower costs. With Dovetail, you can literally…
How Important is Improving the Experience of Your Customer?
April 10, 2017
"Modernize Your Clarify Experience" For years, we have been helping Amdocs Clarify customers / users update or modernize their Clarify experience, which in turn updates the experience of their own customers. We think it's important enough to keep at it. We want to improve your experience and that of your customer. We have a total system approach to modernizing Clarify that addresses all aspects of the system from the user experience and its customization framework to the back-end server applications and security. Believe it our not, we make it possible to completely overhaul the system. Or we can simply solve just one or two particular issues. Dovetail allows you to infuse modern technologies to breathe new life into your Clarify system through expanded methods of deployment, increased functionality, simplified customization and administration, and lower costs. With Dovetail, you can literally…
July 25, 2016
Task Manager for ClarifyI decided to write this to help me get my head around the business end of our new Task Manager product for Clarify. Gary Sherman has put together several posts recently:Dovetail Task Manager IntroductionCreating Custom Tasks for Dovetail Task ManagerTask Manager Trick: Properties with Static Text & a Case PropertyEach of these posts does a great job explaining the technical merits of Dovetail Task Manager, but I felt like I needed to run through some more real-life scenarios to fully understand it. Hopefully, you will find some value here too.The Ease of Task ManagerIt turns out, it’s not really that hard to understand. If you have a business process with multiple activities that could be handled independently of one another, Task Manager makes it easy to set up and maintain. If you have several processes like this,…
June 30, 2016
One of our wonderful customers sent us a bottle of Dovetail sake – very cool! Perfect for a dev team retrospective / planning session. Dovetail Sake is a New England Sake brand based in Waltham, Massachusetts (which just happens to be where I grew up – doubly cool!) We occasionally get emails that are intended for other Dovetails, including Dovetail Games, Dovetail Dental Software, Dovetail Systems, and Dovetail Logistics Software – but we hadn’t crossed paths with Dovetail Sake before. None of us here are serious sake connoisseurs, but it was a nice change of pace. And for the record, should anyone else want to send us more alcohol, we’d be happy to receive it! (Our address is on our Contact page) Cheers!
September 28, 2015
As I was pondered a topic one of my colleagues, Rayanne Thorn, wrote about, Understanding Employee Engagement, it got me thinking deeper about a vendor’s employees, and whether prospects should consider how engaged or happy employees are at a software vendor they are considering as part of their decision-making process. I think they should and let me take you through my reasoning.Evaluating VendorsWhen a customer is evaluating vendors, at the top of their list is usually the vendor’s ability to meet their technological needs. If they can’t meet that, all of the other considerations are mute. After that, close behind are: 1) price; 2) the vendor’s ability to deliver on what they commit to; and 3) the vendor’s customer support. At the end of the day, I consider #2 and #3 to be the most important considerations prospects should consider.…
August 11, 2015
On-Prem to SaaS Over the last 15 years or so as legacy Amdocs/Clarify deployments gradually began to be replaced by other on premise CRM providers such as SAP and Siebel (two we used to see often), companies somewhat knew what they were getting into. They had experience implementing a fairly similar CRM at least once by that point. They knew it was going to be a relatively timely, resource intensive and costly upfront expense to rip and replace. However, as SaaS and various other hosted CRM offerings came along, the enticement of a less costly upfront expenditure, combined with more out-of-the-box configurability from the user and admin standpoint showed promised. Whether it’s an on premise or SaaS solution being considered for rip-and-replace to legacy Clarify deployment, they both have serious challenges that require extremely careful forethought to help ensure success…
August 6, 2010
Great changes are happening with our Dovetail Seeker search product. I wanted to talk about a core change to the product. By moving our application architecture to use messaging we are seeing increased flexibility, testability and performance. Why Messaging? Based on our experience building Dovetail Carrier (pdf), our messaging oriented enterprise integration solution, we decided messaging was a great fit for Seeker’s search indexing windows service. We decomposed the indexer’s behaviors into work (message) producers and consumers. For example to keep your database in-sync with the search index we have a service which watches the database for changes to the objects Seeker is indexing. When a database item is added or updated a message is created which gets put onto a work queue. We have many message consumer threads standing by waiting for work to munch on. Our message consumers…
July 16, 2010
Welcome to part 3 of the series on converting an application from the Clarify Desktop environment to work in Dovetail Agent/Admin. The Employee Manager Utility (EMU) is being migrated into Dovetail Admin, and will provide the tools needed to manage workgroups and the employees that are assigned to them. In the installment of the series, the functionality for the Add... button of the form is going to be implemented. This is going to be a different method that what is normally used in Dovetail Admin due to the fact that workgroups are actually just elements in the WORKGROUP user defined list. EMU adds a lot of information and configuration capability for a workgroup, but there needs to be a record in table_workgroup to hold the details. The Add... button has a small hint that it will have different behavior…