• Dovetail Links 2008-05-15
    Ten Ways to Implement CRM on a Tight Budget....The Four Classical Elements Of The Digital World: Process, Service, Event, and Information....The Pain or Gain from IT Depends on the Match Between Culture and Strategy....The Secret to Creating "Pretty" Code....BPM Series: BPM Bus is Still Boarding Passengers! - Part 2
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  • 14 hours, 9 minutes ago by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Twitter Agent - Decoupling From Dependencies
    Lately I have been posting about a Twitter/Dovetail CRM integration we have been working on. Recently I made some architectural changes that I will hopefully get to in a future post. This time around I wanted to talk about how a problem with the jabber-net XMPP library led to a better more testable design. Connection Stability Last post I talked about how we are using XMPP to send and receive direct messages with Twitter and when Twitter's XMPP presence is up it works great. Really well in fact. The main challenge has been keeping the connection...
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  • 23 hours, 2 minutes ago by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    0 Comments 32 Views
  • Web Developers: Make sure you're displaying script errors
    By default, Internet Explorer doesn't display script errors. Most of the time this is fine, but when developing web applications, you want to be aware of any script errors. For example, lets say you have this line of BLOCKED SCRIPT var foo = document.getElementByid('bar').value; Notice that the "i" in getElementByid is lowercase, which isn't valid. By default, IE won't display an error. The only indication that an error occurred will be an icon in the status bar (if you even have the status bar displayed, which you may not): Double-clicking...
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  • 05-14-2008, 11:52 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    2 Comments 51 Views
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  • Fun, fun, fun with ADO and Unicode characters
    We recently ran into an issue with ADO rendering Unicode characters. To be honest, we're doing some pretty weird stuff inside the fcSDK. We're performing database queries using ADO.NET, and then we take the DataRow and convert it into an ADO Recordset, which we return to our COM based applications. We're using ADO recordsets to maintain compatibility with previous objects that were written in VB6 that returned ADO recordsets. When we were populating the ADO recordset, if the data was basic, standard English characters, then all works perfect. ADO...
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  • 05-09-2008, 4:56 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    1 Comments 134 Views
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  • Customer Satisfaction – Saved by a Technicality
    Maybe I am missing the goals airlines are trying to achieve with their frequent flyer programs. I thought they were trying to attract loyalty among their frequent fliers and recognize them with a few extra perks (besides free trips), like boarding the plane first, or having your own phone number for service. I guess what I was asking for in return for my loyalty was too much. Let me explain. I just attended the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) Conference in Santa Clara. Ironically, at this conference I listened for two days...
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  • 05-07-2008, 9:28 PM by slynn to Stephen Lynn
    0 Comments 82 Views
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  • Notify the case owner when someone else logs a note to their case
    In a previous post, we learned how to use a variable on either side of a business rule condition . Now, we'll create a business rule that uses this type of condition. User Story We'll start with a story: As a case owner, I want to be notified when someone else logs a note to my case, so that I can be kept informed of any activity on my cases. The business rule Here's the business rule which satisfies the user story. Object Type: Case Rule Name/Description: Notify the owner when someone else logs a note to their case Start Events: Log Note Cancel...
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  • 05-07-2008, 12:55 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    2 Comments 70 Views
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  • Using variables on both sides of a business rule condition
    Most people know that you can use a variable on the left side of a business rule condition, such as: Case Type = New Employee The left side of the condition, "Case Type", is actually a business rule property that gets evaluated at runtime. The right side of the condition, "New Employee", is a string constant. Here's what it looks like in DovetailAdmin : and similarly in the Clarify Classic Client:   Using variables on both sides We can also use a business property on the right side of the condition as well. Simply type in...
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  • 05-07-2008, 12:37 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    1 Comments 75 Views
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  • Dovetail Links 2008-05-07
    The Value of Beautiful Code....Customer Loyalty: Confessions of a (Former) IT Scoundrel....BI: Transforming Data Into Usable Information....CRM Is All About Teamwork....Customer Communication: Meet Them on Their Own Turf
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  • 05-07-2008, 11:22 AM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 81 Views
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  • Pretty Dates in JavaScript
    A common way of expressing dates nowadays is to represent them as an approximate age. For example, rather than saying something happened at 5/5/2008 4:21:01 PM , we can say it happened one minute ago . I wanted to use this in DovetailAgent to show the age of the Search indexes. A little Googling brought me to John Resig's implementation of prettyDate() in JavaScript . I tried it out, it was OK. Looking through the comments on John's post, I saw that Dean Landolt posted an updated function that I liked better. I tried it, but it still had a few issues....
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  • 05-05-2008, 5:58 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    4 Comments 93 Views
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  • Having Rulemanager send SMS notifications via Twitter
    Kevin had an earlier post discussing how Rulemanager could fire a script that would notify all queue members via Twitter when a case is dispatched to a queue. The script took the queue name as an input, queried the database for the queue members, and then sent a direct Twitter message to each queue member. I liked what he did, and wanted to see if we could take it a step further, and make it more in line with Rulemanager notifications.   Making Twitter a first class Notification method RuleManager already knows how to resolve queue members...
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  • 05-05-2008, 4:49 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    5 Comments 94 Views
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  • My favorite web apps
    ReadWriteWeb published the results of their survey on what web apps most excited their readers . Here's my list of the web apps I use frequently: Twitter Flickr Google Reader del.icio.us Remember The Milk GMail Google Docs Campfire Basecamp A few more that I like, but just use occasionally StumbleUpon LinkedIn Mint Slacker Pandora Skype TripIt DovetailAgent And finally a few I'd like to get to know: FriendFeed Twine SlideRocket   What about you? What do you use?
  • 05-02-2008, 10:19 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 195 Views
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  • Swim Naked or Provide Good Customer Service in Bad Times
    While the U.S. suffers through declining home prices and rising unemployment, the Nero 's of economics are tuning up their fiddles while trying to determine if we're technically in a recession. Forbes reported this week that , "Regardless of the GDP numbers, data show unambiguous signs of a struggling economy. For homeowners watching prices drop, for the newly unemployed or for businesses with low corporate profits, the current debate over whether the economy is in recession is largely meaningless. What these people want to know is simple: When...
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  • 05-02-2008, 8:22 AM by slynn to Stephen Lynn
    0 Comments 99 Views
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  • Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-29
    Customers Really Are the Lifeblood of Your Business....Customers as Surprising New Sources for Innovation....Report: No Recession for CRM....CRM Spending Looking Up....The BI Boom Part 2: New Twists
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  • 04-29-2008, 2:09 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 92 Views
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  • Customer Service: Would You Risk Your Job for the Customer?
    Would you be willing to put your job on the line to give your customer good support and service?

    That's what Verizon employees did recently in Florida when the IBEW Local 824 union staged two days of picketing across the state. The union's Doug Sellar was reported to have said...
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  • 04-23-2008, 9:59 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Spring Alt.Net Pledge Drive
    I just wanted to take a moment out of our regular blog-cast to tell you that Alt.Net is supported by listeners readers like you. Smart people work really hard volunteering all their free time and energy to put out great open source software for our community. We need to keep these people coding not wasting their time drumming up consulting gigs or looking for jobs. Just wanted to read off a couple names of people that just contributed. Thank you Ray Houston for donating. You must have deep pockets with that sir name. Oh, and I see Chad Myers donated...
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  • 04-23-2008, 3:12 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    1 Comments 146 Views
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  • Clarify 6 - still running after all these years
    I'm currently working with a customer who is running Clarify version 6. Not Amdocs CRM6, but Clarify version 6, or as the marketing brainiacs tagged it - CFO98 (Clarify Front Office 98). I'm amazed that they're still running a 10 year old enterprise application, and haven't upgraded at all in 10 years. On the other hand, it speaks to the power of the system that it continues to work and provide value, despite its age. They're now working with us, so that they can upgrade their database to something more current (Oracle 10g), and they're looking...
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  • 04-22-2008, 4:19 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 125 Views
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  • Moving the Dovetail Twitter Integration To Jabber/XMPP
    Quickly after creating a Twitter Integration with Dovetail I ran into rate limiting issues using Twitter's API. Twitter currently only allows 70 requests per hour. Here is their guidance... If you are developing an application that requires more frequent requests to the Twitter API, please contact us and we'll see what we can do. We maintain a white list of known-good screen names who have high-volume API needs. We also suggest researching Jabber/XMPP if your application needs to deliver a near-realtime experience (for example, a bot that replies...
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  • 04-22-2008, 1:59 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    3 Comments 366 Views
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  • Pairing Your Twitter Account With a Jabber Client
    Twitter will send direct messages and updates for friends you follow who have notifications turned on to a device. Cool. Better yet a device can be a mobile phone (SMS) or an Instant Messaging account. The goal of this post is to show how to sending and receive messages to Twitter using a Jabber device. To do this we will be using the excellent IM client Digsby which it turns out has excellent Jabber support. Here is what we will be doing. Creating a Jabber ID in Digsby. Adding the Twitter Jabber ID as a contact for your new Jabber ID. Pair your...
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  • 04-22-2008, 1:05 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
    4 Comments 240 Views
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  • Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-21
    Extreme Customer Service & Support: When Employees Picket for Customers....Why Enterprise Architects Need to Support the Role of Technical Lead...Business Intelligence: The BI Boom, Part 1: New Players....Late and Over Budget – The Hidden Traps of Implementing CRM Systems
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  • 04-21-2008, 12:42 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 125 Views
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  • Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-18
    The Future Customer-Centric Organization: Best Practice and New Strategies for Improving Customer Service....Comparing Application Management and Traditional Systems Management....Are SOA-related Business Concerns Outside the IT "Comfort Zone?"....A New Iron Triangle - IT At the Intersection of Buyers and Users....Alignment of Business and IT through Cost Estimation, Part I
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  • 04-18-2008, 3:33 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 156 Views
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  • Dovetail knows Clarify as good as, if not better than, Clarify
    Over on IT toolbox, a recent post was inquiring about people's experience of dealing with Dovetail . One of our customers responded: we were a customer of theirs for about 2 years (purchased Super Email Clerk)...we moved on to a different package at the end of those two years, so we did not need them. I did Clarify work from version 5 through version 12 (from 1997 - 2004) on various projects, so my Clarify experience is pretty decent. Everything I have heard about FC/Dovetail has been solid. Their people know Clarify, the data model, the architecture...
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  • 04-18-2008, 12:30 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 131 Views
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  • Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-17
    ERP Implementation Surprises and How To Deal With Them....Thought Leadership Grows Around Advancing ‘WOA Plus SOA’ as Enterprise-cloud Duo....Business Systems for a Faster, Flatter World....How To Choose Among The Four Bright Lights Of BI....Marketers Missing the Boat on Customer Data
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  • 04-17-2008, 12:15 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 140 Views
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  • Has anyone seen this movie before?
    Is it just me or is "ITIL" a new flavor of an old game (not to mix metaphors)? Corportate initiatives like Six Sigma and ISO 9000 before it were marketed as the latest industry standards for increasing quality, efficiency and productivity. Did they really provide any meaning benefits? Now along comes ITIL proclaiming many of the same benefits to companies and their IT organizations while providing significant revenue streams to the consultants and other vendors providing the infrastructure for this new initiative.
  • 04-16-2008, 3:15 PM by mbailey to Mike Bailey
    0 Comments 102 Views
  • Dovetail Daily Links 2008-04-16
    Removing the C from CRM....Process as a Substitute for Competence....Piloting within IT....Should We Continue to Invest in Enterprise Architecture?....San Quentin Prison: IT Failure is Life or Death
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  • 04-16-2008, 12:15 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 161 Views
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  • Customer Service – The Right Way and the Wrong Way
    Being in the business of selling CRM software utilized by customer service and support organizations, I am constantly observing the way companies support their customers. Let’s look at two companies in action. I stay in a particular hotel frequently and know many of the staff. As I walked into the lobby last week, I noticed a car with a flat tire parked in one of the handicapped parking spaces. An elderly couple was standing outside their car chatting with the front desk manager while the maintenance man from the hotel was changing the flat tire...
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  • 04-16-2008, 9:00 AM by slynn to Stephen Lynn
    0 Comments 148 Views
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