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Tag: Gary Sherman

Snackbyte: Implementation services should include source-code control

November 15, 2007 This is just a little snackbyte that I was thinking about today: Implementation services should include source-code control. Meaning, when a vendor helps a customer with implementation of the vendors product, part of the service should include source-code control. Not maybe. Not an extra cost. It's just part of the deal. Our implementations include custom web pages, config files, schema change files, dat files, etc. These should all be under version control. If the customer has an existing source code control system, great - use it. If not, put one in place. Subversion is free, is easy to use, and works great. Show the customer the value and ease of using a good source code control product. Just another way to add value to the customer. And when everyone starts doing this - take it to the next level. How…

Migrate a business rule from one database to another

November 13, 2007 I was working with a customer today, and they mentioned that one task that is problematic for them is moving business rules from their test database into the production database. Currently, the business rule is manually created via the Clarify Client in the test instance, and then when its all working, it is then again manually re-entered into the production. Manual re-entry is a point of potential failure. The rule may have been perfect in test, but a simple typo when re-entering it in production can cause havoc.One solution to this issue is to archive the business rule using ArchiveManager or dataex from the test database, and then use ArchiveManager or dataex to import it into production.Business RuleFirst, I created a new business rule in my test system:Object Type:CaseRule Name/Description:New Employee RequestStart Event:DispatchCancel Events:NoneConditions:Case Type = New EmployeeAction Title:Create SubcasesMessage…

Firing Business Rules based on the business hours of a queue

November 6, 2007 One of our customers posed an interesting problem to me this week. They have offices in different locations, in different time zones, with different business hours. The employees in these offices work on different hours from one another, meaning that while one group is working, another group is not working, and vice-versa. The issue comes in when one group dispatches a case to a queue to be worked by the other group. More specifically, the issue is when the queue members should get notified by RuleManager. If the queue members are off-hours, then they should get notified as soon as their next work day starts. Seems like it should be straight-forward. Let's give it a go. First Try Let's create a specific test example to illustrate the notification process. I created two sites, the Texas Support Center (in CST), and…

What we need is a user story

October 31, 2007 There was an interesting discussion this week over on the Clarify IT Toolbox list - interesting (to me) not so much because of the technical question, but because how it brings to light user stories, or lack thereof. The original question: How Can I custimize the process of "Accepting" a case. I want to have a msgbox before a case is accepted. Some of the discussion: what is your customisation exactly ?  what will appear in your msg box ? I just want to display a message Box before a case is accepted.msgbox can contain any text message like "Hello". Do you want the message box to appear before the accept dialogue appears? "Before a case moves to the default wipbin (because I am having only one wip bin), a msgbox with some text should poped up." You still fail…

My free resume tip of the day: include your contact information

October 29, 2007 I received a resume today from someone looking for a job. It was forwarded from a job search board. His resume has his name, but no contact info. Not a phone number, email address, website, physical address - nothing. Guess who won't be getting a call from me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but this isn't the first time this has happened either. I've received similar resumes in the past. Unreal. Got Clarify Skills? Anyway, if your resume includes your contact info, your Clarify skills are kickin', and you'd like to work with great developers, community leaders, Agile VPs, extraordinary testers, and me, in one of the coolest cities in our land, tell me why you'd make a great addition to our technical team, helping us develop and support our customers.

Quick auto-login to Dovetail Agent (fcClient)

In a call center, most agents tend to stay logged into their CRM application all day long, as it is their primary use application. However there are also many other users who simply log in occasionally, do what they need to do, then log back out again. Personally, I fall into the later category. I log in and out of our Dovetail system all day long. Even more so, I log in and out of my development instance all day long. Which means every time I log in, I have to re-enter my password. Actually, I have to open IE, click my bookmark for my development Dovetail Agent site, enter my password, and click the Login button. Since I do this all day long, I wanted an easier way to do this. One Click Access Dovetail Agent (formerly fcClient) needs…

cctvtmmain : a useful, but broken, and poorly named, utility for closing child cases

October 26, 2007 We recently received an inquiry from a customer asking about Clarify's cctvtmmain utility. Specifically, it was throwing a useless error message, and they wanted our help. Our first response was WTF is cctvtmmain? A little research, and we discovered that its a utility for working with parent and child cases. From the Clarify documentation: The Enterprise Service Manager uses parent and child cases. With parent and child cases, you can associate a group of problems with a common cause. The parent case identifies the root cause. A child case is a customer problem that arises due to the root cause and is linked to the parent case. A child case differs from a Subcase, which is a way for subdividing a case for parallel work by different employees on the same customer problem. For example, suppose a WAN outage occurs…

Microsoft is changing the world – at least part of my world – for the better

October 8, 2007 I’m a big fan of Hugh McLeod, and being that I am part of the Microsoft ecosystem, I have been following his Blue Monster Project. In a recent post, Hugh says: That if Microsoft wishes to change the world, then changing themselves is also, most definitely, a big part of the equation. I saw some of that change this weekend. I saw Scott Guthrie present his team’s new ASP.NET MVC framework. Listening to Scott present, it was clear that he and his team had been listening to the community. They’re listening to the bloggers, the MVPs, the ALT.NET crowd. They listened, and the result was a positive change that came through loud and clear. In the closing session of the ALT.NET conference, Scott Hanselman (who joined Microsoft just a mere 3 weeks ago) openly commented about his time at Microsoft,…

ASP.NET MVC framework

This was an unbelieveably exciting session at the ALT.NET conference. Scott Guthrie demo-ed an upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework. It rocked! The principles: Separation of concerns, unit testing, red/green TDD, maintainable Extensible and pluggable Enable clean urls and HTML Integrate nicely within ASP.NET + .NET core code, support static + dynamic languages Everything is based on an interface, including IHttpRequest and IHttpResponse, which makes them mockable. Jeffrey has a good overview here. I am not an ASP.NET developer. I am a Classic ASP developer. I have watched my co-workers develop ASP.NET (using webforms) and found it overwhelming and confusing. I have been recently watching Ruby on Rails developers, and I have been jealous. Templating that makes sense, clean separation of controller and views, explicit and clean HTML, and testability. At first look, it looks like Microsoft has encapsulated those same principles…

BDD (Behavior Driven Development) Discussion at the ALT.NET conference

I’ve had very little exposure to BDD, so I was interested in learning more. Specifically, most of my BDD knowledge has come from Scott Bellware, so I wanted to hear what others had to say about it. I listened to Scott Bellware’s explanation, but he seemed to focus more on the value (from his standpoint), as opposed to really answering the question “What is BDD?” He stressed the work soluibility. It was great to hear Scott Hanselman question that nomenclature and replace it with grokability. Grokability is more soluable than solubility, commented Roy. I agree. The big questions that seemed to go unanswered: Why should I care about BDD? What benefit does it give me? What I walked away with was a way of using ubitiquous language to bridge the gap between the developers and the business. Joe Ocampo than…