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Tag: Kevin Miller

Avoid Mickey Mouse Email Loops

January 12, 2009   Say you have an application (i.e. bot, script, automaton, service)  polling an email account (POP3 or IMAP) for emails. And say that your application sends an automated response back to the sender of the email. Be careful. You can easily get into situations that will create an email loop or worse yet the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome.   After sending email from an automaton it is quite common for the receiving mail servers to bounce emails back or accounts to temporarily respond with an “Out of Office” response. If your service is not smart enough to ignore automated responses to it’s own emails? Well. The streams will cross and poorly written email services will implode under the weight of your unending email loop. Kittens die. System administrators call you. This is bad.   RFC 3834 comes to the rescue with…

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:

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…

Automating Multi-Platform Database Integration Tests

September 5, 2008 When you have to support multiple database platforms it can be challenging to automate integration tests against more than one DBMS. Dovetail is using build automation driven by with NAnt and virtual machines running on VMWare Server to automate the setup and execution of our integration test suite against multiple versions of Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. I want to share some of the lessons learned from our journeys along the way . Integration Tests Make your integration tests data driven. If at all possible setup your tests so that they create their own test data. Tests responsible for their own data setup are simply less fragile. A lot of dev cycles got wasted trying to understand why a test is failing that was caused by one test messing up the data another was dependent on. Automate automate automate.…

Installing Dovetail Classic ASP Web Applications on IIS7

August 19, 2008 Here at Dovetail I recently started developing on a Windows Server 2008 64bit OS. Today I wanted to install Dovetail Agent as a web application on IIS7. I ran into a few problems. After gnashing my teeth for a bit I found a path to goodness. My biggest problem was 64bit related. I hope this post saves you some time getting our web applications up and running. ASP Needs To Be Enabled I believe that by default when you are adding the Web Server (IIS) role to Windows Server 2008 that the ASP feature is not added by default. Start Server Manager select the Web Server (IIS) Role. Click on Add Role Services. Make sure you have at least ASP and Server Side Includes and ASP.NET selected. IIS 6 Management Compatibility You may also want to select the IIS 6…

Creating a Windows 2008 Server x64 Developer Workstation

August 3, 2008 For about a year now I have been running Ubuntu on my personal laptop. A stab at diversity. I was playing with Rails in my spare time and also needed to brush up on my Unix. I was young… willing to experiment. My direction changed back to .Net, I am loving C# 3.0 by the way, yet I kept my Linux laptop because it was so swift and easy to use. A poor man’s Mac Book really. The only thing I couldn’t do with Hardy Heron, yes that is the name of the distribution, was .Net development with my familiar toolset. I am very very addicted to Visual Studio.Net IDE (sorry MonoDevelop, I know cop out.) Doing some development with ASP.Net MVC has had me wishing for a development machine that supports IIS 7 and I saw all the cool…

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…