Dovetail Software Blogs

This post is for my readers who are Dovetail Email Agent customers. We are getting ready to release Email Agent 1.5 which contains some breaking changes that Gary Sherman has already posted about. I wanted to give our customers a heads up of what has changed to facilitate upgrade planning. Below is a draft of the “What’s New” from Version 1.5 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

I have been doing some work using Twitter as a notification mechanism for case events taking place in Dovetail CRM. I also wanted to expose an API of sorts driven by Twitter direct messages which would allow support agents to work on cases via Twitter. I created a twitter account for Dovetail and went crazy. To the right is a screen shot of my ...

We recently moved into new offices here at Dovetail, and with our new offices came a new phone system. One of the features of the phone system is that we can get an email whenever we get a voicemail. The email contains a WAV file of the actual voicemail recording. This allows us to easily be notified of, and receive voicemails, even when we're ...

Kevin Miller recently had a recent post talking about how we have notifications from our Clarify/Dovetail system show up in Campfire. When a case is dispatched to our support queue, we get a notification in Campfire. That tends to be where we all "hang out", so its a perfect place for group notifications. Kevin had another great idea ...

Curious: on average,  how many time_bomb records does your Clarify system generate per day?   How can you determine  this?Assuming you're not using objid caching (which is the typical  scenario), simply take note of the current maximum objid in table_time_bomb.  Here is sample SQL for doing this: select max(objid) ...

I like it when customers log notes to their cases by the web using Dovetail SelfService. I *really* like it when customers close their own cases by the web. How do I know when this happens? By a business rule, of course. Object Type: Case Rule Name/Description: Notify the case owner when case is modified via the web. Start Events: Log ...

More and more I'm starting to pay attention to the discussions regarding DSLs (Domain Specific Languages). Specifically, I've been thinking about business rules as a sort of DSL. Scott Bellware and I have had many conversations about this. To me, how we define business rules is a good example of a Business DSL. A simple business rule example: ...