August 7, 2014
Literature sheet for our BOLT product from back in 2001. Thirteen years later, I still use that app daily. Supports Windows NT 4!
August 31, 2012
Since I use BOLT almost everyday as a developer, I committed some time to upgrade the look and feel of the app. In the process of the upgrade, I also added many improvements to the html, javascript, and sql. Twitter Bootstrap The big change was to update the CSS used, and I wanted to use (and learn) Twitter Bootstrap. Twitter Bootstrap is a powerful front-end framework designed for faster and easier web development. It is maintained by developers at Twitter, and has a great community of support. Twitter Bootstrap was built to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!), but in tablet and smartphone browsers via responsive CSS as well. Taking advantage of this in Dovetail Bolt makes it much easier to support and maintain. For comparison, here is…
May 27, 2011
With 64-bit machines becoming more and more prevalent, we’ve seen some confusion popup around installing and using applications. Is the app 32-bit? 64-bit? which database provider do I use? Is my web app 32 or 64 bit? etc. It’s confusing. No doubt. tl; dr Short answer: If you’re on a 64-bit machine, and using Oracle, use the 64-bit Oracle provider for OLE DB for BOLT. 64-bit Windows explained There’s a great post from last year that “explains 64 bit”: Programs are still in the same place, in %ProgramFiles%, unless you need the 32 bit version, which is in %ProgramFiles(x86)%, except on a 32 bit machine, where it’s still %ProgramFiles%. All those dll’s are still in %SystemRoot%System32, just now they’re 64 bit. The 32 bit ones, they’re in %SystemRoot%SysWOW64. You’re with me so far, right? Oh, and the 16 bit ones…
September 26, 2017
If you receive a business rule notification message, but you're unsure as to exactly which business rule it came from, there's a few ways to find the originating rule. Notification Message For example, lets say that you received the following notification: Email Notification How do I find which business rule caused this notification to be sent? There's actually a few options here. 1. Dovetail Agent - Query Business Rule Actions Using Dovetail Agent, create a query for Business Rule Actions Dovetail Agent - Query Business Rule Actions And filter for Message Contains something happened This will show you a list of rules that contain that string in the message. Dovetail Agent - Query Results Clicking one of the results will take you to the Business Rule itself. [caption id="attachment_7594"…
July 18, 2017
Dovetail Agent has a number of Work Item types. The most common are Cases, Subcases, and Solutions.In addition, there are Change Requests, Part Requests, and Action Items.Not everyone is familiar with Action Items, so this post will cover the basic of action items - what they are, how you might use them, and how they compare to cases. Action Item BasicsAction Items are simply a task that needs to be completed.The task could be any number of things - depending on how you wish to use them.For example, an Action Item could be used:To setup a customer's online account for SelfService/WebSupportAs an Operations task, such as upgrading a serverTo track a contract renewal processetc. Action Item in Dovetail Agent You can use different action item types for different tasks, so you're not limited to a single use case for…
November 14, 2016
I recently posted about how to Query Anything with Dovetail Agent. Specifically I showed how to setup a custom query for part inventory.In this post, we’ll look at creating a specialized flavor of a existing query.We have built-in query capabilities for work items (including cases), but instead, lets walk-through an example of allowing for querying on case activities.For example, show me how many cases were dispatched to the benefits queue in the last 90 days.For case activities, we’ll need to query the activity log (table_act_entry). In general, I discourage querying against this table using your online production database, as it’s typically the biggest table in the database, and queries against this table can adversely affect performance for everyone using the system. But, depending on your particular use case, your database, database size, database tuning, etc – this may be ok.You…
November 11, 2016
In this post, we’ll look at how to create new ad-hoc queries to query anything in your system, purely via configuration.For those that have been around the Clarify/Dovetail/First Choice space for a while, you might remember that we used to have an add-on product for the Clarify Client named Query Anything. So yes, this post title is a nod to that. This is a continuation of the series on queries within Dovetail Agent, so it might be useful to first review the previous posts:An overview of configuring queries in Dovetail AgentHow to override the baseline queries Out of the box, Dovetail Agent allows for ad-hoc queries on:AccountsContactsContractsEmployeesSite PartsSitesThese are all great – but its common that we want to query on other objects – other baseline Clarify objects, or even custom objects.Lets walk through an example of how to do this. Inventory QueryFor this…
December 17, 2015
"The Cloud"Recently, we migrated our Clarify/Dovetail implementation to the cloud. Specifically, into Amazon’s AWS infrastructure.We setup a sandbox environment a couple months ago, and then migrated our production instance this month.As far as I know, we have the only Clarify production implementation running in the cloud.If you navigate to our support site at https://support.dovetailsoftware.com – that’s all running in AWS.We have multiple AWS servers/components in play, as well as some tools that we use, which I’ll cover in more detail here. Application ServerThe app server is Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter edition.No surprise, we run our Dovetail suite of applications, including:Dovetail AdminDovetail AgentDovetail MobileDovetail Agent ReportingDovetail SelfServiceBOLTBootstrapCarrierRulemanagerSeekerSchemaEditorArchiveManager (DIET)In addition, we also have some of our own customizations, including:Custom web servicesCustom Rulemanager actions (mostly Powershell scripts)Custom scheduled tasks (mostly Powershell scripts) Database ServerThe database server is Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter, running Microsoft…
October 27, 2014
Back in 2010 I created a wiki for sharing Rulemanager knowledge that went along with some Rulemanager and Business Rule webinars that I was doing. At the time, wikispaces was a great place to host a free wiki. They recently announced that they are no longer offering a free wiki option. So, I’ve moved my rulemanager wiki to Github. You can now find it at https://github.com/gsherman/rulemanager/wiki Github I really dig Github for being able to share and collaborate on projects. We use it internally for hosting our codebases, we use Github Issues for issue tracking, we use their wiki features, and gists for sharing code snippets. In their own words: “GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers.” I agree. What else do we share on Github? Tons of stuff! Bolt – a…
June 12, 2014
Recently I was looking to put a report together that would track the total number of cases that are open on a daily basis, and graph that as a trend. This is fairly tricky to do with baseline data. It would be easier if I had a query that ran every night and simply recorded the total number of open cases at that point in time. All I need is the count, not the actual data. Then I would have a set of records that I could build a report with. My first thought was to create a simple script that would run the query, then set this up as a Scheduled Task to run nightly. Then I could store the results somewhere in the database. Then I realized that this all sounded familiar – this is Trend Tracker. Trends…
