Deliver Order from Chaos

While setting up some advanced capabilities of DovetailAgent, we ran into some IIS/Windows permission issues. This post is to capture and share some of the learnings.

To start with, Kevin Miller has a good post on installing Classic ASP web application on IIS7.

Kevin Miller did a recent sneak preview of Dovetail Seeker 2.0, which we’re hard at work on here.

Here’s an additional sneak preview of search capabilities from the Agent side of things.

Search attachments

Search case attachments, solution attachments, etc.

In a previous post, I discussed how to publish activities from your Clarify/Dovetail CRM system into Socialcast. Cool stuff.

Saving Searches in Dovetail Agent

One of the things under development for the next version of Dovetail Agent is the ability to save your favorite searches.

Here’s a screenshot:

One of the more underused features within Clarify/Dovetail is the ability to link cases to solutions. Its a great feature - I just don't see it used often enough.

This allows organizations to track which solutions are used the most, and use that information to feed back to production groups (development, engineering, documentation, etc.) to help prioritize changes/fixes/enhancements.

Making it easier for agents to link solutions and cases would certainly be beneficial. If its hard, they're less likely to do it. So, make it easy.

In previous posts, we've covered the basics of Seeker, along with searching custom attributes of an object (such as case.x_notes).

Continuing on, lets look at how to index and search custom objects.

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.

A common way of expressing dates nowadays is to represent them as an approximate age.

For example, rather than saying something happened at 5/5/2008 4:21:01 PM, we can say it happened one minute ago.

I wanted to use this in DovetailAgent to show the age of the Search indexes. A little Googling brought me to John Resig's implementation of prettyDate() in JavaScript.

I tried it out, it was OK.

Many customers use hierarchical (multi-level) drop-down lists in their Clarify/Dovetail implementations. So, when one level of a select list changes, the down-level lists change as well. Clarify allows up 5 levels for a list.

As an example, in baseline Clarify, there's a list titled CR_DESC that is a three level list for CPU, Operating System, and Memory. When I change the CPU from PC to Sun, the operating system and memory lists need to change as well.

Default values show: