• A few UI Editor Tips & Tricks
    Kevin walked past my laptop the other day and noticed an ugly looking hot-dog-inspired-colored window, and asked - what the hell is that? This is what it was: Ugly? Absolutely. Useful? I think so. I thought it deserved some explanation, so here goes. Colors I purposely use the bright colors to distinguish the different elements, along with the exact space each element takes up, and how each element lines up. This is especially helpful for labels. This is purely to assist with the design of the form in Clarify's User Interface Editor. These colors...
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  • 16 hours, 18 minutes ago by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • Dovetail Links 2008-07-23
    SAP to Increase Maintenance Fees....Analytics Help Firms Turn Data Into Opportunity....A Key Challenge of Context Driven Architecture....Seven Ways to Thaw a Frozen IT Budget....Agile Development Brings IT, Business Together
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  • 07-23-2008, 7:33 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Impact, Urgency, and Priority of a case
    One of the best practices that ITIL brings to the party within Incident (case) Management is prioritization . ITIL calls out 3 separate attributes: impact, urgency, and priority. Impact : the measure of how business critical it is. Urgency : a necessary speed of resolving an incident. Priority : formulated from the combination of impact and urgency. Some formulate it as Priority = Urgency + Impact . Others use Priority = Urgency * Impact . They key difference that ITIL presents with the concept of Priority versus the classic usage of Severity is...
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  • 07-21-2008, 5:11 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • When Clarify grids go bad
    For the most part, Clarify is pretty easy to customize. Occasionally, you run into Clarify forms that just don't behave as you would expect. In particular, the "old" Clarify forms, that were all written in C, long before ClearBasic was considered - those can be problematic. ClearLogistics forms are also typically problematic - the initial ClearLogistics development team seemed to have their own way of doing things back then. We recently assisted a customer with such an issue, and I'm sharing it here so hopefully it may help others in a...
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  • 07-18-2008, 4:35 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • ITIL certification
    I've been diving into ITIL in more detail lately, understanding IT best practices, and how our products and processes match up with the guidance set forth by ITIL. What is ITIL? ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a public framework that describes Best Practice in IT service management. It provides a framework for the governance of IT, the "service wrap", and focuses on the continual measurement and improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a customer perspective. Certification On occasion, people have...
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  • 07-17-2008, 5:02 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • Dovetail Links 2008-07-16
    Business Intelligence: Software Helps Decision Makers....Firms Seek Out Disgruntled Customers on the Web....Using Business Process Models as the Source for Software Requirements....What is Global Enterprise Architecture?....Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle
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  • 07-16-2008, 6:30 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Scenario Testing With Watin
    We are starting to use WatiN to automate the testing of a web application. So far it is working pretty well. One of the things I found confusing was handling confirmation alerts like this: Pop-ups like this need to be handled by Watin. The code for handling this looks like this. 1: //setup a handler with Watin 2: var confirmDialogHandler = new ConfirmDialogHandler(); 3: browser.DialogWatcher.Add(confirmDialogHandler); 4:   5: //click the button that causes a confirmation pop-up 6: browser.Element( "buttonId" ).ClickNoWait(); 7:  ...
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  • 07-16-2008, 4:50 PM by kmiller to Kevin Miller
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  • jQuery = Simplification
    I came across this code today, and it took me a second to figure out what it was doing: strSortOrder = document.getElementById("ad").options[document.getElementById("ad").selectedIndex].value; To break it down, it locates a Select control on the page (FindElementById), finds the element again and gets its selected value's index (selectedIndex), and sets the variable to the value of the option at the specified index (options[index].value). There is a jQuery plugin that really simplifies this process. Using jquery.selectboxes.js...
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  • 07-11-2008, 3:54 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
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  • Limited Space Still Available for the Dovetail Developer Workshop
    Attention all Dovetail developers: Space is limited for the upcoming Dovetail Developer Workshop, July 21 -- July 25, so you need to act fast. If you'd like to learn how to configure, manage and customize a Dovetail CRM environment please register now by sending Kathy Lacy an email, or calling (512) 610-5457.


    Here's all the details...
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  • 07-10-2008, 6:04 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • App.ShowSolution in ClearBasic
    I'm sure most of the ClearBasic brainiacs already know this (and I may have at one point), but the parameter to App.ShowSolution is a record of type "workaround", not a record of type "probdesc". I probably knew this at one time, but its been a long time since I've done ClearBasic coding. I'm blogging this so that I can find it again in the future, with Google's help, of course.   If you call App.ShowSolution with a probdesc record, you get this ever-so-helpful pile of joy: Cannot map specific relation (type 1 with relation...
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  • 07-07-2008, 6:52 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • Dovetail Links 2008-07-04
    The Call Center Cha-Cha....How Come Enterprises Don't Ask Their Software Vendors for Bug-fix Only Releases?....Not Really News: Cable, Satellite Customer Service Stinks....The #1 Reason IT Often Fails to Deliver Value....Sprint's World Of Pain
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  • 07-04-2008, 5:28 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Fun with Wordle
    Fun with Wordle , based on my tags.
  • 07-03-2008, 3:11 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 103 Views
  • Press Release: Dovetail Software Invites Developers to Five-Day Workshop
    Austin, TX — July 2, 2008 — Dovetail Software, a leading provider of software solutions and services for the Clarify® CRM user community, today announced open registrations for its Dovetail Developer Workshop, July 21 – July 25, for customers interested in learning how to configure, manage and customize a Dovetail CRM environment. The syllabus includes a thorough review of the base-line architecture, and many intensive programming labs where students will build significant new functionality using all the elements needed to both customize existing pages and create new ones.

    The Dovetail Developer Workshop will take place...
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  • 07-02-2008, 2:19 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Manage Queue Membership: Making It Easier
    Dovetail Software, Inc. recently recently received a request from one of our customers to make Queue Membership Management easier and more efficient to use. The screen image to the left shows the Manage Queues form in Dovetail Admin, Version 2.5 . When a queue is selected at the top of the form, its current members and supervisors are displayed at the bottom right of the Membership tab. Adding or changing members and supervisors was done one by one, and with only the login name for each user to determine the identity of each user. The login names...
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  • 07-01-2008, 3:31 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
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  • Manage Queue Membership: Behind the User Interface
    The first step in making the changes was to add the first and last names to each of the membership grids. This simply required changing the data source for the user information from the user table to the empl_user view in both of the user grid pages. The grid_queue_mem.asp and grid_queue_mem2.asp pages each retrieve a list of records from the database, and build a table of user information from the results. Adding multi-select capability required much more change, so it was time to look for a better way to get the job done. This is where jQuery...
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  • 07-01-2008, 3:26 PM by styson to Sam Tyson
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  • Dovetail Developer Workshop, July 21-25
    Summer is here and so is our next Workshop. We're putting on a five-day event, the Dovetail Developer Workshop, July 21 through July 25 here in Austin, TX for Dovetail developers interested in learning how to configure, manage and customize a Dovetail CRM environment. Space is limited, so please register ASAP by simply sending Kathy Lacy an email, or calling (512) 610-5457.

    The workshop will kick off with a review of the Dovetail CRM components and the base-line architecture. Later sessions will walk participants through...
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  • 07-01-2008, 2:39 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Highlighting Priority Cases
    A common customization within Clarify is to highlight priority cases in a wipBin or queue by setting their color. For example, make High Priority cases really stand out by coloring them red. Clarify Classic Client The ClearBasic Customization Guide has a couple of examples on how to do this with the Clarify Classic Client. However, the customization was commonly applied to the Queue and wipBin forms - not the console. As a reminder: to view the wipBin form, simply double-click a wipBin from the list in the left side of the console. Similarly, for...
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  • 06-30-2008, 2:54 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • Interesting post on Case Types and Case Severity
    Over on the 37signals blog, they're talking about some of their design decisions in tweaking their support request form . In Clarify/Dovetail parlance, we have a Case Type and a Case Severity . It seems 37signals have gone back and forth between the two, trying to capture both pieces of data in one element. I do think there are 2 distinct values - the type of issue (billing, feature request, bug, etc.) and the severity/urgency of the issue (high, low, urgent, etc.), and I think their post shows the struggle when trying to combine them into one....
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  • 06-27-2008, 9:44 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    1 Comments 208 Views
  • Customers "Going Time Warner" akin to "Going Postal"
    When customers are on the receiving end of bad service, it's basic human nature for them to tell at least ten of their friends. In fact, it's good for your mental health to vent your pent-up frustrations and it's also good for the economic health of those companies that listen and act upon these complaints. While it's a given that companies that fail to listen will lose customers, what happens when a customer bottles up all his anger and fails to complain?

    This guy allegedly kidnapped a cable repairman and held him hostage till his cable was fixed. And then there's this 76 yr-old church-going secretary who waited two hours to talk to a manager, then came back with a hammer and in her words,

    "I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor ... and I went to hit the telephone. I figured, 'Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.'"
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  • 06-26-2008, 3:05 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • Dovetail Links 2008-06-25
    SOA Governance Dos and Don'ts....The Real SOA Governance Dos and Don’ts....Business Process - Linking Business and IT....Why Business/IT Alignment is Elusive....The Usefulness of the Use Case?
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  • 06-25-2008, 2:19 PM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
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  • DeleteById in Dovetail SDK
    In the Dovetail SDK, there is a DeleteById method on the ClarifyGeneric object . This is useful when you know the objid of the record you want to delete. Perhaps the objid is posted to a web page, or you've pulled it out of a relation column from a different record. DeleteById is available via the .NET interface. It is not available on an fcGeneric object via the COM interface. How can we DeleteById in COM? Simply use the AddForUpdate method, then do the Delete . Example: var objid = 268435459; var modem = FCSession.CreateGeneric('modem'); modem.AddForUpdate(objid);...
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  • 06-25-2008, 10:54 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
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  • A handful of presentations on JavaScript and jQuery
    John Resig (creator of jQuery) recently posted a bunch of his presentations online , focused on JavaScript and jQuery. Check 'em out. I'm fast becoming a huge fan of jQuery , and we're now using it a lot more within Dovetail Agent . Not only is the library itself cool - but the plethora of available plugins really make it rock.
  • 06-24-2008, 4:29 PM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    1 Comments 111 Views
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  • Encode URLs with ClearBasic
    At Dovetail one of the things we sell is Clarify Helpdesk support. This means that customers having problems with Clarify Client can get support when they run into issues. We had an interesting case recently that I thought would be good to share with the community. Under the hood Clarify Client uses a variant of Visual Basic called ClearBasic which makes the behavior of their windows application customizable via scriptability. Using ClearBasic, Clarify developers can modify the script used behind any of the forms in the Clarify Client application....
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  • 06-23-2008, 10:46 AM by gsherman to Gary Sherman
    0 Comments 135 Views
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  • Our People Make the Difference
    Our goal is to provide the best software possible to our customers and even better customer support. To do that, you need the right people – those dedicated to serving the customer and committed to advancing their own knowledge, often on their own time. That is the culture we have created at Dovetail Software, and I am quite proud of all our employees. Our employees are constantly reading, networking, and chatting with leading-edge technologists to make sure they are up to speed on what is driving the industry and to improve their own knowledge....
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  • 06-20-2008, 6:29 PM by slynn to Stephen Lynn
    0 Comments 111 Views
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  • Common Sense Customer Service and Support
    It's common sense that during tough economic times the smarter enterprises redouble their customer service and support efforts -- or so you would think. Customer service, it's sad to say, is not a priority for most businesses, according to new research out of the U.K. The Ken Blanchard Companies found that even though good customer service is an essential competitive advantage in a downturn, only 10% of businesses reported customer service as important challenge in 2008 and, "only 38% recognized it as any kind of priority at all."
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  • 06-19-2008, 10:19 AM by Dovetail Software to Dovetail Software
    0 Comments 151 Views
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