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Tag: Kevin Miller

Think About User Experience

August 28, 2009 Separate the user from complexity. Spam filtering is pretty complex stuff. The act of signaling an email is spam should not be. Which of these user interfaces for Spam handling do you think works better? Outlook 2007 – 1 action = navigation + 6 options A classic lesson from Don’t Make Me Think. The cognitive load in Outlook is very high. The steps for a email user wishing to mark an email as spam. Some how know to right click on the email. (acquired knowledge) Click on Junk E-mail.  (Find the menu item) Pick from a list of 6 potential junk email options. (Read and understand what each option means) GMail – 1 to 1 Gmail recently changed their menu items condensing them down and in my opinion reducing their readability. However I find the task of marking email as…

Producing and Consuming Messages using MassTransit and StructureMap

August 26, 2009 I am spiking out right now what it takes to use a Mass Transit as a message bus for handling a simple producer consumer messaging architecture. To be exact I want to see how easy it is to get Mass Transit working using StructureMap for an IoC container. Dovetail uses Inversion of Control extensively to make our code more: testable and able to leap tall buildings, dodge bullets, and all that. Our favorite IoC container is StructureMap. Why? Because it is great and we have two contributors on staff: creator Jeremy Miller and the brainy Josh Flanagan. Getting Started My first step was to grab the Mass Transit trunk from SVN, build it and start up a new solution with three projects: Producer – produces messages. Consumer – consumers messages. Common – code shared between producer and consumer. In this…

Mobile Case Creation

July 30, 2009 One of the most requested features we get for Dovetail Mobile Agent is the ability to create cases. Request no more. Wait no longer. Well, maybe just a bit longer. I just finished an update that adds mobile create case functionality. We are going to use it internally for awhile before shipping it. If you want to take it for a test drive send me an email. Here is a sneak peek for everyone. Finding the correct customer Technically this screen was the most difficult to pull off. Finding a customer is typically the first thing you do when creating a case. In this situation it tells us two very important things: who is the contact for the case and what site are they are working at. Looking at the image above I see room for improvement. See this is…

Dovetail Seeker 1.2 Released

July 21, 2009 If you are not a Dovetail customer be prepared for a boring post. If you are a fan or our search product. Be prepared to be rocked! My last couple of posts have been talking about the cool stuff coming out in the next version of Dovetail Seeker? Well, the next version of Dovetail Seeker is here. I hope you enjoy it. I’d love to know how you are using Seeker in your organization below or if you prefer off-line. What’s new in version 1.2 Important Changes Dovetail Seeker now requires version 3.5 SP1 of the .Net framework. Seek.exe has been renamed to SeekerConsole.exe Application settings are now located in the install directory within the applicationSettings.config file. New Features Dovetail Seeker now includes a Windows service for keeping your search index up to date. For more information see Seeker Windows…

Dovetail Seeker update part deux

July 14, 2009 Yesterday I added a feature that will be in the next release of Dovetail Seeker.Executive Summary: Coming soon, support for indexing against Clarify views.Didn’t it support that already?Well.. No. I was working on a feature for Mobile Agent that I wanted to use some cool search techniques to facilitate and found out a view would work better. When I tried to do just that the indexer exploded with nasty unfriendly errors. What is a developer to do but stop everything and add a feature.Does this great power come with any great responsibilities?Yes. Paths traversing relationships are not allowed when indexing views. What is a path? Well, paths are basically instructions telling the indexer how to find the piece of data you want in the index. Against tables paths can include relations which are not possible for views. This means you…

Dovetail Seeker Update

July 9, 2009 We will soon be releasing a new version of Dovetail Seeker our information retrieval tool for Dovetail/Clarify CRM. The big news in this release is that Seeker now includes a windows service for keeping your indexes in-sync with your database in near real-time. This release also adds the ability to wipe and re-index your search indexes after database purges. Previous Seeker Posts Seeker Introduced Previous Release Post Creating your own Seeker Client Real-Time Indexing Driver Gary and I have been thinking about different scenarios where Seeker could be used. One of them was to use search to replace how users find different types of data. I’ll leave diving into that scenario in more detail to Gary. Think Find Caller using a single search box. One of the requirements that came up was that the search index would need to in-sync…

Syntax Highligher

April 24, 2009 This is a sample post using Alex’s very nice looking Syntax Highlighter for code snippets. Let’s see if I can get Community Server to behave. Teaser Code public class SolutionMap : DovetailMap { protected override void MapDefinition() { FromTable("probdesc") .Assign(d => d.SolutionID).FromIdentifyingField("id_number") .MapMany().To(d => d.Resolutions).ViaRelation("probdesc2workaround", workaround => workaround .Assign(d => d.DatabaseIdentifier).FromField("objid") ); } } Update: Looks like I got it working. Sorry about the guinea pig post. The code above is actually something I have been wanting to post about for some time. Maybe now with these super sweet code blocks I’ll get’er done.

Installing Visual SVN Server

April 15, 2009 After being forced to re-install a Apache hosted Subversion service I decided to use Visual SVN Server and found the process of migrating from a existing multi-repository Apache Subversion service to be quite straight forward. I did learn a few things along the way that I wanted to share. Why I Had to do it. (a.k.a Whoops!) I did a dumb thing. I attempted to upgrade the version of our own existing Apache Subversion service in the middle of the day. You likely know how the rest goes, terribly. I Backed up all the files I was going to touch and dropped in the new .dlls in the right places and viola upgrade! right?. Not so much. The server didn’t start. So I reverted to my backups and the server still didn’t start. Oh noes!!!111one. Apache puked and people started…

Can your CRM place a phone call?

April 13, 2009   When new cases come in we have many ways of having our support team notified so we can provide speedy assistance to our customers.   We get an email Twitter sends us direct messages Our campfire (chat) gets notified   Recently we needed a better way to notify on-call support agents of new cases. Our existing notification mechanisms work great during office hours but at night a spam email getting past my filters better not wake me up at 2am just because it might be a new support case. We needed something better. The simplest thing we could think of was to have our CRM make a phone call.   Phone calls are cross platform. No special smart phone client application beats a phone call. Better yet spammers don’t place calls  at 2am pitching “Enlargement”. At night I can…

Mobile Agent 1.1 – Now with better access to your knowledge

January 23, 2009 Today we are releasing a better Dovetail Mobile Agent. In this release we focused on exposing the knowledge contained in your Dovetail CRM to your mobile agents and public users.  For more details please take a look at the documentation but to sum up I’ve composed for you a sort of visual what’s new in this release. Agents can now… Search for and use solutions while working cases. Solutions found to apply to a case being worked can easily be sent and linked to the case. Searching now returns both solution and cases. Once a solution is found details about it can be easily sent to a case.   Because sending emails from a mobile device can be time consuming, Mobile Agent fills in most details of the email for the agent. The solution is also linked to the case…