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Tag: rulemanager

Commitment Templates

January 28, 2015 In our last episode, we looked at Commitments in Dovetail Agent. When a commitment expires, or is about to expire, the system will notify the user. Rulemanager is what sends out the notification, and the content of the notification message is defined by the commitment templates. Lets take a look at these templates, and see how we can make them better. Templates There are two templates in the system that are used for commitments: Commitment and Warning. These are stored in table_com_tmplte. With the commitment enhancements that we’ve made to Dovetail Agent, we can also enhance the commitment templates to provide more information and context. Commitment Template Here’s the commitment template we provide with Dovetail Agent.  They’re simply DAT files that you import using dataex or DIET. The interesting part of the template is really the action field: RE: Commitment…

New home for Rulemanager companion wiki

October 27, 2014 Back in 2010 I created a wiki for sharing Rulemanager knowledge that went along with some Rulemanager and Business Rule webinars that I was doing. At the time, wikispaces was a great place to host a free wiki. They recently announced that they are no longer offering a free wiki option. So, I’ve moved my rulemanager wiki to Github. You can now find it at https://github.com/gsherman/rulemanager/wiki Github I really dig Github for being able to share and collaborate on projects. We use it internally for hosting our codebases, we use Github Issues for issue tracking, we use their wiki features, and gists for sharing code snippets. In their own words: “GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers.” I agree. What else do we share on Github? Tons of stuff! Bolt – a…

Charting case trends

June 12, 2014 Recently I was looking to put a report together that would track the total number of cases that are open on a daily basis, and graph that as a trend. This is fairly tricky to do with baseline data. It would be easier if I had a query that ran every night and simply recorded the total number of open cases at that point in time. All I need is the count, not the actual data. Then I would have a set of records that I could build a report with. My first thought was to create a simple script that would run the query, then set this up as a Scheduled Task to run nightly. Then I could store the results somewhere in the database. Then I realized that this all sounded familiar – this is Trend Tracker. Trends…

Encouraging SelfService use

November 7, 2013 We use our Dovetail SelfService application for supporting our customers on a daily basis. It gives customers the power to access what they need, when they need it – quickly and easily. Customers have access to: knowledgebase product downloads product documentation license keys And of course, they can interact with our support staff using cases: create new cases update existing cases: add notes, upload files, change severity close cases reopen cases etc. When a case is created via SelfService, customers pick the severity of the issue, such as: Low - I've just got a question Medium - It's minor and not significantly affecting production High - Production is heavily degraded Urgent - Production down We use Rulemanager and business rules to notify our support staff. For Urgent cases, we send SMS messages and make a phone call to the on-call…

Business Rule: Notifications on customer activities

October 25, 2013 I’ve posted in the past about how to notify the case owner when someone else logs a note to their case.  I find this especially useful when a customer does something in SelfService, or responds to an email that is processed by Dovetail Carrier. For example, if a customer logs a note to a case in SelfService, I want to know. If a customer responds to an email, and is automatically logged to a case (via Dovatail Carrier), I want to know. This post recaps information in the previous post, and adds some additional niceties to the notification message. Notification Email Here’s an example of a notification received via email:   The business rule Object Type: CaseRule Name/Description: Notify the owner when someone else logs a note to their caseStart Events: Log Note, Close Task, Phone Log, Log Email, Email…

How To: Close a case when all of its subcases are closed

August 5, 2013   I got a question today about how to close a case when all of its subcases are closed.   You could certainly add code to your application (such as the Clarify Client or Dovetail Agent), but to me, this sounds like more workflow automation, and we can do that with business rules. Plus, if you use multiple client applications (lets say the Clarify Client and Dovetail Mobile) – you don’t want to have to customize each of those apps.   To accomplish this task, we’ll create a business rule that fires when a subcase is closed. If all of its sibling subcases are also closed, then we can close the case.   First wrinkle: How do we know when all of a subcase’s siblings are also closed?   One way to do it is to look at all of…

Troubleshooting Bad Time Bombs

November 1, 2012 There are times when Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb in the system. Although it’s easy to just ignore when this happens, it’s better to diagnose the issue to understand (and resolve) the root cause.   This post will walk through an approach to troubleshooting bad time bombs. Time Bombs   Recall that a time_bomb record is created when events happen in the system, such as a case being created or closed, workflow actions (dispatch, accept, assign, yank), etc.  Rulemanager is responsible for picking up these time bombs, and comparing them against the defined business rules in the system, to see if something should happen, such as a notification. Time Bombs Gone Bad   On occasion, Rulemanager will report a bad time_bomb. This will typically show up in the Rulemanager log file. It may also be reported via email, if your Rulemanager…

Custom Events in Clarify/Dovetail: Change Priority

September 13, 2012 I’ve talked in the past about how to create custom events in Clarify/Dovetail, and how to fire business rules based on these events.   In short, code needs to be written that creates a custom activity log and time bomb.   A recent webinar covered details on how to do this: http://www.slideshare.net/gsherman/advanced-business-rules-part2 (starting on slide #18)   For additional info, take a look at the "User-defined Business Rule Events.doc" available on the Rulemanager wiki: http://rulemanager.wikispaces.com/How-To   If you also want to create a custom act_entry record, you'll probably want a custom activity code. Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/1042796   Change Priority   One of our customers recently wanted to do something similar, but for Change Priority of a case. They wanted to be able to fire a business rule when the priority of a case changes. They needed this to work…

Business Rule: Only notify certain queue members

March 8, 2012 This week I was posed an interesting scenario from a customer. They have certain users who need access to every queue. But, they don’t want those users to be notified when a case is dispatched to that queue. For example, lets say that the Maintenance queue has 4 members: Fred, Annie, Gary, and Steve. Fred and Annie are regular users. But Gary and Steve are part of the Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC has access to every queue, as they need to be able to peek inside each queue to see what’s there, read the case titles, etc. But, since the NOC belongs to every queue, they get a lot of business rule notifications – one for every case that gets dispatched to a queue. But they don’t need to get all of those notifications. So how do we…

Notifying the Yankee (part 2) This time with the Clarify Client

December 21, 2011 Recently I posted about how to notify the yankee, meaning the person who a case was yanked from. I showed how to make this happen within applications that use the Dovetail SDK (Dovetail Agent, Dovetail Mobile, etc.) Now, lets see how we can accomplish the same task within the Clarify Classic Client. Setup Most of the setup is the same as I covered previously. 1. Turn the participant2user pseudo-relation into an exclusive relation 2. Setup a business rule recipient alias for the “Yanked From User” 3. Create a business rule that uses the “Yanked from User” as a recipient of a rule 4. Add the participant record Add a Participant using ClearBasic To add a participant record, we can add some ClearBasic code behind form 737, which is the Yank form. Caution: this is an old-school C form, so much…