In how many ways does Dovetail CRM add to the existing utility of the Amdocs Clarify database? The answer is “countless”, but here are some of them.
Over
a hundred of the largest Clarify corporate users depend on Dovetail’s
APIs to extract super-performance from their systems. Dovetail supplies
close to six hundred APIs (and now Web Services also), to add functions
into existing applications. The area of support, for example, has
around one hundred APIs devoted to ClearSupport, for creating,
amending, and manipulating cases on the fly from the agent desktop
across the enterprise.
Out of the box is never enough of
course, which is why IT wants to custom-write procedures at times. For
the benefit of IT people who want to create custom APIs for the
Dovetail suite, Gary Sherman of Dovetail details the procedure in a
recent post on his blog: Extending SuperEmailClerk.NET to call your own APIs
Dovetail’s SEC.NET
(SuperEmailClerk.NET), implemented as a Windows service, allows
operations to be performed against the Clarify database by email. This
is a lifesaver for many, because the Amdocs Email Manager has long had
issues with performance, reliability, and scalability.
SEC.NET, which is mail-server independent, provides an inexpensive mechanism for quick and easy integration
throughout the enterprise computing environment. It works by invoking
APIs and returning the results in an email.
Dovetail has
been able to create its market-leading APIs from the beginning because
nobody understands Clarify better than Dovetail. Customers and IT
departments who worked closely with Dovetail’s engineers were always
impressed with their capabilities, and now with the advent of the
engineer blogs on the Web, we are able to look into the development
shop and see the Dovetail engineering ethic at work.
Dovetail is an agile developer, as we mentioned recently, and this includes agile testing, as engineer Jason Darling recounts.
“We were brought in with Waterfall-like
methodologies, long detailed system engineering processes, and divided
Dev and QA teams, where vast amounts of code were thrown over the wall
and testers had to perform independent verification and validation
within a very unrealistic time frame.
“Then, we had a glimpse of the future, with the Agile-like methodologies introduced to us.” – I Don’t Want to Graduate, I Want To Be A Great Tester
As we highlighted in our Agility post, the “waterfall” extends beyond software development methodology
into the whole of enterprise development planning. Perhaps we’ll see
the spread of agility in planning processes as well as in development
missions.
Another revealing note of Dovetail’s evolving
software development process is sounded by engineer Kevin Miller, in
his blog post, during a first test of the new Outlook 2007. “I would
argue that having to be told how to use a product to make it effective
is a design flaw.” This is a great attitude for a software developer,
and Clarify users are grateful. See (the comments) Google Desktop vs Outlook 2007
