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Tag: Dovetail

Sending Knowledge To Your Customers

January 5, 2009 Our next release of Dovetail Mobile Agent is focusing on adding functionality for agents and customers alike to access Dovetail CRM knowledge. I wanted to talk about one of the features we are adding to allow agents to send a solution to a case. Solutions = Knowledge A little background. Dovetail CRM support agents can capture Solutions to common problems. These solutions are more useful when exposed to the customer so they can solve their own problems. We do just this on Dovetail’s website. Let Me Find That For You It is pretty common though that a customer will not be diligent enough to search the existing knowledge base. Or diligent customers may not know the correct search terms and are not getting useful hits from your knowledge base. Frustrated they’ll create a case for a common problem. For these…

Dovetail Seeker 1.1 Shipped

December 3, 2008 We have added a few bows and ribbons to Dovetail Seeker our handy web based search service for Clarify. We’ve made it easier for search clients, like Dovetail Mobile Agent, and Dovetail Search for Clarify, to page results. Added example code for consuming Seeker’s search services from a .Net client. Better documentation of the search service API. Details Details Here is a copy and paste of our release notes for this version with all the gritty details. Version 1.1.0 Documentation added with information on the Seeker Search Web Service API. Added client-example directory to the installation directory. This directory now contains source code and assemblies for a C# Seeker client. Please view the ReadMe.txt file in that directory for more information. Added new value RequestedNumberOfResults to the search results information returned by the search service. This value reflects the number…

Dovetail Mobile Agent and Your Recent Case Activity

October 23, 2008 One of my favorite features in Dovetail Mobile Agent is the Recent Workgroup Case Activity view which displays a listing of all  the cases recently modified by agents in my workgroup. At the end of the day I sometimes browse Recent Case Activity using my Dash from the comfort of a bar stool or easy chair. Here is a snapshot of the Call Administrator workgroup (my emphasis not some silly CSS style) This is also quite a handy view for Support Managers wishing to keep tabs on their minions agents. Why filter by workgroup? The short answer is to avoid drinking from the support information fire hose. We are using the employee workgroup as an way to logically divide up an organization. For most organizations trying to see all case activity for any reasonable time period, say a day or…

Blackberry’s Web Browser Caching Stinks

Ran into an issue taking Dovetail Mobile Agent for a test spin on a Sam’s Blackberry Pearl. We noticed pretty quick that web pages were not getting refreshed. It was really obvious when I logged in to my account using Sam’s phone and saw his cases rather than mine. It turns out that the web browser on this particular Blackberry does not check with the web server to see if a particular web page has been updated. We found a pretty easy fix. Just add a Cache-Control HTTP header to every web page sent by the web application. Every page?! Isn’t that hard? Nope. Here is how to solve the problem on IIS6:

Creating IIS7 web applications from the command line

October 9, 2008 While trying to decide if I should create a Windows Installer for Dovetail Mobile Agent. I was doing some research on how to automate the setup of web applications on IIS7. Turns out it is quite easy from the command line when you are local to the web server using AppCmd.   With the helpful batch prowess of of Chad Myers I cooked up this batch file which creates a web application with its own application pool. @echo OFF SETLOCAL SET webSiteName="Default Web Site" SET vdir=/mobile SET physicalPath=C:\projects\mobile\source\Dovetail.Agent.Mobile SET applicationPoolName=dovetailmobile SET APPCMD=%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe   %APPCMD% DELETE APPPOOL %applicationPoolName% %APPCMD% DELETE APP %webSiteName%%vdir%   %APPCMD% ADD APPPOOL /name:%applicationPoolName% %APPCMD% ADD APP /site.name:%webSiteName% /path:%vdir% /physicalPath:%physicalPath% /applicationPool:%applicationPoolName% ENDLOCAL

Deploying an ASP.Net MVC web application to IIS7

October 7, 2008 The next installment in my exciting series where I capture what I know about deploying Dovetail Mobile Agent which could be boiled down to How To Be a Web Server Administrator in the year 2008. Moving from IIS6 this time we take a look at getting an ASP.Net MVC application deployed to IIS7. Thankfully this is pretty easy.   To try out this experience I created a Vista SP1 Enterprise virtual machine and added the IIS 7 windows feature. I know. I know. Most enterprise customers will want to use Windows 2008 as their favorite IIS7 platform, I had to use Vista because I use VMWare Server v1.x which supports Vista not Windows 2008. Revenge of the Basics   Install the .Net 3.5 Framework.   Add the Internet Information Services Windows Feature To Vista. In Windows 2008 this process is very similar in cases you will…

Installing a ASP.Net MVC web application on IIS6

October 6, 2008 Getting ready to release Dovetail Agent Mobile I am working on what our installation story will look like. I want to keep things simple (for me) right now because it is currently tricky to support IIS6 and IIS7 using a Wix based windows installer. For the documentation I am compiling a list of operations to get what is essentially a ASP.Net MVC web application up and going on different web servers.   Later we may later add an installer that encapsulates this pain but right now it is just too darn hard to do this well usingWix. Do you hear me Microsoft? Getting Down With The Basics   Install the .Net 3.5 Framework.   Copy web application files to a directory our your web server.   Create a Virtual Directory using Internet Information Services Manager that points to this directory. ASP.Net…

Email Agent 1.5 Heads Up

September 19, 2008 This post is for my readers who are Dovetail Email Agent customers. We are getting ready to release Email Agent 1.5 which contains some breaking changes that Gary Sherman has already posted about. I wanted to give our customers a heads up of what has changed to facilitate upgrade planning. Below is a draft of the “What’s New” from Version 1.5 this may change so remember to check your local listings for more details. Breaking Changes Email Agent now logs "Email In" events to a case rather than logging a note. This change will mainly affect customers using our Rule Manager product having business rules that are setup to fire on "Log Notes" events, in particular those that are meant to capture "Log Notes" events created by Email Agent. Affected business rules should be changed to include a start event…

Exposing Knowledge Using Dovetail Seeker

June 13, 2008 Dovetail Seeker is our new search offering for Dovetail CRM. One of the primary design goals from a developer's point of view is to make it easy to integrate with Seeker. I know I am biased, but think we did pretty well. In this post I'll I share my experience integrating Seeker with our public web site exposing search access to Dovetail's Knowledge Base. Why Is This A Good Idea?For a long time we've exposed to customers the ability to browse our knowledge base. Here it is:This is a pretty good solution for Dovetail administrators looking for common solutions to issues that may pop-up. A better solution would be to let users search the knowledge base for the exact issue they are running into and see what pops up. Being able to search for an problematic error message is pretty handy:Raise…

Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database (and Rest of World)

Static image February 27, 2007 Those who have called Daylight Savings Time a folly from the beginning may snicker at the Congressional decision to alter the dates, but those who have anything to do with software aren’t laughing. Changing the dates of the Daylight Savings Time active period, for the first time in decades, will throw a lot of clocks out of sync.   Dovetail engineer Steven Weintraub has compiled a list of dates affected by the new law, and instructions to update Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Clarify database   “This requires a good knowledge of CLARIFY database setup and SQL. This is a problem. I am sure Clarify is providing a solution for those using Clarify support – but this does not help the many customers who have stopped paying support.   “For those customers (and this blog post is for you) – they have to…