Deliver Order from Chaos

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.

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:

While working with a customer this week, they asked about automatic subcase creation, similar to Clarify's Task Manager module.

For example, if a new case of type "New Employee" is created, then I want to automatically create 3 subcases:

In a call center, most agents tend to stay logged into their CRM application all day long, as it is their primary use application. However there are also many other users who simply log in occasionally, do what they need to do, then log back out again. Personally, I fall into the later category. I log in and out of our Dovetail system all day long. Even more so, I log in and out of my development instance all day long. Which means every time I log in, I have to re-enter my password.

Over the last couple of years, a number of very useful JavaScript libraries and frameworks have been introduced that make it tremendously easier to build rich web applications. A few of the more popular ones:

• Prototype
• Script.aculo.us
• MooTools

These frameworks allow developers to easily write very rich, cross-browser web applications.

One of the common tasks for a support/call center manager is making sure the team is living up to its service level agreements (SLAs). Pretty much every customer I've ever dealt with has different SLAs. As you can imagine, there's a zillion ways for companies to setup and track their SLAs.

Example SLAs:

One of the features of the fcSDK is its ability to cache frequently-used, rarely-changed data, such as the schema meta-data (ADP tables),  lists (Application Lists, Status codes, User-defined lists), geography data (states, countries, time_zones, currencies), configuration items, and strings.

Clarify employs a strict ownership paradigm with its application, meaning that only the owner of a workflow object can make a critical change to it. This ownership paradigm was baked into the product, and difficult to modify.

For example, anyone can add notes to a case, but only the owner can change the status.

What's a critical change? Let's take case as the object in question, and see what Clarify considers critical.

Critical changes:

We're currently working on version 1.1 of RuleManager. This version was fueled by customer requests, and should be available very soon.  

Here's what's coming in version 1.1: