Dovetail information feeds

gsherman — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:46:40 GMT

Did you know we provide a few different information feeds that help you stay informed with information about Dovetail? By subscribing to feeds, new information is delivered to you – which means you don’t have to go visiting lots of different web sites to see if there’s new content available.

Blogs

There’s a RSS feed for all the Dovetail bloggers, or you can subscribe to individual bloggers, if you so wish, by visiting their page and clicking the orange RSS icons in your browser or by clicking the RSS link.

Some of us also allow for subscribing by email, in case you’re not an RSS kind of person.

Product Releases

There’s a feed for product releases – so you’ll know when new products are available – including new revisions of existing products.

Knowledgebase

There’s also a feed for new knowledgebase articles. This feed is interesting because it allows you insight into new Solutions – including some best practices, bug fixes, how-tos, and workarounds.

Solutions and Product Releases? That sounds like CRM data.

Those last two feeds – Product Releases and Knowledgebase – the data from those come from our Dovetail / Clarify system. No surprise – the knowledgebase is Solutions (problem descriptions and workarounds), and the product releases are Parts (part numbers and mod levels). We use the Dovetail SDK to retrieve the data that we want (solutions, part revisions), and then a little bit of ASP.NET code to create the feed. Kevin Miller has a nice write-up explaining how to create RSS feeds using ASP.NET.

Pretty sweet!

What other data could you syndicate out of your CRM system? For your employees? For your customers?

RSS?

Confused about feeds and RSS? No worries. The folks over at Common Craft have put together a simple video explaining RSS in plain English.

It's like deja vu all over again.

Hope you find this post (as well as our other information feeds) useful.

Rock on.

A feed for new Knowledgebase Articles

gsherman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:07:27 GMT

Kevin has put together an RSS feed for our most recent knowledgebase articles. The feed can be subscribed to using a feed reader (such as Google Reader), and any new articles will be delivered to you. Very cool.

We eat our own dogfood here, meaning we use our Dovetail/Clarify system for our customer support team - including the knowledgebase (solutions). Being kept informed about new solutions is good for our support staff, but also for other members of our team - including Sales Engineers, the Product and Development teams, etc - as well as our customers who live in our products every day.

While I really like this specific example, I think the general idea of syndicating data from your Clarify/Dovetail system is totally rockin. Combine the code that Kevin laid out in his post, along with some Dovetail SDK code for querying the database, and you're off to the races.

RSS

Confused about RSS? No worries. The folks over at Common Craft have put together a simple video explaining RSS in plain English.

Other examples

How about some other examples of CRM data that could be syndicated?

part request activities, so a customer knows when their defective part has been received and when a replacement has been shipped.
case activities - letting customers know when their case has been updated or its status changed
new product releases
contracts that are expiring soon
etc.

How about you - what ideas do you have?

Your Clarify system may seem a bit long in the tooth at times - but with a little love (and some Dovetail tools) - you can continue to reap huge value from it.