Tag: rulemanager

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…

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…

Clarify Rule Manager: The Final Answer

October 16, 2007 Clarify Rule Manager, and Dovetail RuleManager, are the all-important modules that manage the business rules such as when to escalate an open case to the next level of response. Being able to work with Rule Manager is crucial of course, and questions arise from time to time. One conversation about Rule Manager and Time Bombs in the ITtoolbox forums lasted for six years. Started in August 2000 with a question about time bomb errors, the thread finally ended (or so it seems) last year, when Dovetail Software, experts in the Clarify install, supplied the last word. “When a rule changes via the Clarify classic client, Clarify creates a timebomb with the title of the rule and the flag of 131076 (0×20004). No other information on the timebomb are relevant (relations are all null, the times are the zero time, etc.).…

SLA Monitoring

August 31, 2007 One of the common tasks for a support/call center manager is making sure the team is living up to its service level agreements (SLAs). Pretty much every customer I've ever dealt with has different SLAs. As you can imagine, there's a zillion ways for companies to setup and track their SLAs. Example SLAs: All cases must be responded to within 2 business hours All Urgent priority cases must be responded to within 1 hour regardless of business hours All cases must be responded to within the phone response time as stated on the contract All cases must be closed within 5 days. All subcases of type "Hardware Upgrade" must have a technician onsite within 36 hours. All new cases for a Gold level customer must get a call back from a senior tech within 1 hour. An initial response…

fcSDK Cache files: sometimes more trouble then they're worth

July 30, 2007 One of the features of the fcSDK is its ability to cache frequently-used, rarely-changed data, such as the schema meta-data (ADP tables), lists (Application Lists, Status codes, User-defined lists), geography data (states, countries, time_zones, currencies), configuration items, and strings. When the fcSDK starts up, it reads all of this data from the database and saves it into memory. In addition, it writes out the data to cache files. The next time the fcSDK starts up, if there are cache files present, it loads the data from the cache files, as opposed to having to go to the database. This improves the performance of the loading of the cache data, as reading from a local file is quicker than loading from a remote database. However, these cache files can often cause trouble. If a piece of cache data is changed in…

RuleManager version 1.1 released

July 9, 2007 Dovetail RuleManager 1.1 is now officially available. My previous post has details of what's new in this release. RuleManager Documentation is available online. To obtain this release, create a request using Dovetail SelfService, or send us an email.

Upcoming product release: Dovetail RuleManager 1.1

July 5, 2007 We're currently working on version 1.1 of RuleManager. This version was fueled by customer requests, and should be available very soon. Here's what's coming in version 1.1: RuleManager can now include attachments for emails initiated via a LogEmail action, which are typically made from within fcClient or the Clarify Client. The application taking that action, such as fcClient or the Clarify Client, is responsible for relating the LogEmail (table_email_log) to the attachment(s) (table_doc_inst). Because RuleManager will only attach files that it has access to, we recommend that the path to the attachment is a UNC path such as "\serverpathfile.ext". If RuleManager cannot access an attachment, the email will still be sent without the attachment. RuleManager will log an error when this situation occurs.The working directory of RuleManager is now the directory where RuleManager is installed. This is relevant when…

Having RuleManager invoke command line scripts

June 26, 2007 I've received a few questions on this recently, so I decided a post is in order. One of the features in Rulemanager (both the Clarify/Amdocs Rulemanager and the Dovetail Rulemanager) is the ability to have it invoke command line scripts/executables via a business rule action. For example: if a case has been in a status of "waiting on customer" for more than 30 days, run a script that will close the case when a new contact is created, run a script that will send the contact data to another system (such as an ERP system) when a case is closed, run a script that will send the customer a satisfaction survey etc. What kind of scripts can Rulemanager run? Basically, any kind of script or executable, as long as no UI activity or user input is needed. …

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