REQUEST A DEMO

Tag: integration

Improving our Slack integration

December 10, 2015 SlackLast year I posted about Integrating Clarify/Dovetail with your group chat app. That post was around the time we started using Slack for our group chat.At that time, I was using Slack’s simple webservice to post messages about cases. OriginalFor example, case dispatch notifications looked like:Simple. But not very detailed. ImprovedRather than just using Slack’s simple web service, I’m now using their Attachments, which allow for more richly formatted messages.Notice there’s now much more information available, including:Top-level message (In this case,  “Case Dispatch Notification”)Case IDContact and Site NameCase title (which links to the case in Dovetail Agent)SeverityQueueLink to the case in Dovetail Mobile And it’s easy to add whatever other relevant information in there that I would like. Business Rule ActionThe business rule that fires on case dispatch now calls the CaseMessage.bat file, like so:C:\Dovetail\RuleManagerActions\slack\casemessage.bat [Object ID] dovetail "Case Dispatch Notification"To that BAT file,…

Integrating Clarify/Dovetail with your group chat app

September 19, 2014 Here at Dovetail, we’ve evolved our use of group chat over the years. We used to use Campfire, then went to Hipchat, and now we use Slack. Our dev and support teams are in Slack all day, and I find it much more enjoyable than email. I’ve noticed that the amount of email we deal with now is considerably less. It’s integrated with Github, so we get notifications on Github issues and code commits. And, of course, we post messages based on business rules from Clarify/Dovetail.  For example, a message is auto-posted when a case is dispatched and when it is accepted. As a group, we often discuss a case to help the case owner get it resolved. And this discussion happens in our group chat.  Slack really is pretty awesome. Regardless of which group communication tool you use, it’s…

Authentication across applications, including Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite

December 11, 2012 We’ve worked with a couple of customers recently who use some other application for authentication. Basically, Single Sign-On. One was using CA SiteMinder, and another had a home grown application. In both instances, we were able to easily allow Dovetail Mobile / AgentLite to work with their existing authentication mechanisms, allowing single sign-on capabilities. This means that if a user has already authenticated in their environment, then they were automatically logged into Dovetail, without having to enter their username and password again. Pretty nice user experience.   In this post, I’ll share some of the details about how this all works.   For this scenario, our customer had a home grown “App Store”. Users logged into this App Store, which authenticates them, and then shows them a list of applications that they are authorized to use. One of them is Dovetail Mobile.  …

Credit Card Authorization via Clearbasic

May 27, 2011 I was recently asked if we could tie into a credit card authorization service from the Clarify Classic Client.   The particular service in question was Authorize.net, which allows merchants to accept credit card payments.   What’s nice about Authorize is that they expose web APIs that can be called via HTTP. Their developer site is pretty good – with lots of different options, and sample code in a variety of languages.   I’ve blogged in the past about making web requests and consuming result sets, so the approach here is similar – although in this instance it’s even easier. The results from Authorize are just a delimited string, which is much easier to parse in ClearBasic than JSON. Giddy Up   I signed up for a test account, grabbed some sample code from their site, and ported it to ClearBasic.   The API is pretty much what you expect…

Socialcast Integration, Episode 2: The UI

June 24, 2010 In a previous post, I discussed how to publish activities from your Clarify/Dovetail CRM system into Socialcast. Cool stuff.Continuing on this same line, I wanted to explore having access to Socialcast within your CRM application UI. Since this is where agents spend a good deal of their day, why not have a widget that shows their home stream, and allows them to share, update, and comment?Socialcast widgetWe can easily embed a Socialcast widget right onto the agent’s console within DovetailAgent. This would allow agents to see their home stream, post an update, or comment on someone else’s post.We can use the Google Gmail gadget provided by Socialcast to do this. Normally this is used as a gadget within Gmail or iGoogle, but we can use it anywhere we want.Once you’re logged into your Socialcast site, navigate to the Socialcast Applications…

Clarify / Dovetail Activity Streams

June 18, 2010 Ever since I heard about activity streams, I’ve been thinking about an activity stream out of our Clarify / Dovetail Customer Service system. I saw Chris Messina present about activity streams at SXSW 2010, and got even more jazzed.What are activity streams? From the activitystrea.ms wiki: ActivityStreams is a convenient and consistent way to syndicate social activities around the web.OK, how about a little more detail, perhaps with some context?I’m going to quote right from the Socialcast website here, as I think they do a good job of explaining this.Inside of every company, there can be hundreds or even thousands of sources of data. Information is generated by people (through emails and social network messages) and by systems (CRM and ERP systems, and inventory tracking, for example). Where the information flows and how it is used is strictly defined by…

HTTP request from cbbatch on UNIX

April 15, 2010 While answering some questions about integrating Clarify with web apps, I got a follow-up question (off the list) asking about how to make an HTTP request from cbbatch on UNIX. He didn’t care about the response – the page actually is just a php script that triggers a process on the web server; nothing visual is shown. Here’s my reply: I would use curl to make the HTTP request. curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax. It's available for Windows, Mac, and a boatload of flavors of UNIX. The curl website: http://curl.haxx.se/ I’ve used curl in a couple of previous posts. From cbbatch, just shell out and use curl to make the HTTP request. Like this: Sub test() Dim shellCommand as String Dim processId as Integer Dim url as String Dim curl as String curl…

Messaging as an Enterprise Integration Pattern

February 19, 2010 With our recent release of Dovetail Carrier, we’ve been having more conversations around messaging as an enterprise integration pattern. (For more on Carrier, be sure to check out some of Kevin Miller’s recent posts on the subject.) In my feed reader this morning, I saw a new post from Gregor (a software architect from Google) where he discusses some of his thoughts about the right places for use of messaging. Good stuff. The list of advantages for messaging as a transport mechanism cuts to the heart of why we like messaging. For even more, be sure to check out Gregor’s site: Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration, where there’s plenty more details on messaging.

WebHooks in Clarify/Dovetail

February 9, 2010 What is a WebHook? From the WebHooks wiki: The concept of a WebHook is simple. A WebHook is an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when something happens; a simple event-notification via HTTP POST. A web application implementing WebHooks will POST a message to a URL when certain things happen. When a web application enables users to register their own URLs, the users can then extend, customize, and integrate that application with their own custom extensions or even with other applications around the web. For the user, WebHooks are a way to receive valuable information when it happens, rather than continually polling for that data and receiving nothing valuable most of the time. WebHooks have enormous potential and are limited only by your imagination! (No, it can't wash the dishes. Yet.) That sounds like a business rule (in Clarify…