siebel

As day 2 of Oracle's annual fest begins to unfold, let us attempt to summarize what big announcements and not so big news were reported so far by Oracle itself, the media and hundreds of determined tweeps and bloggers. Quote from Larry Ellison's Sunday keynote 1. Cloud Unsurprisingly, the dominating topic is cloud. As Larry Ellison announced in his Sunday keynote ( which you can watch here ), Oracle is not only aiming at becoming a PaaS, IaaS or SaaS vendor but providing all three layers of cloud computing at once. This included announcements to make six new cloud services available in the near future. You can educate yourself on the current status of the Oracle Cloud on the ever-changing and ever-growing landing page here . Oracle definitely sees itself as a full-stack vendor, and rightfully so. From "silicon" to applications, we have it. The only thing that Oracle does not (yet) have is our own browser ;-). So Oracle is indeed in a good position to become a major p...

Packt Publishing is well known for their efforts of making IT knowledge accessible to everyone under fair conditions. The current campaign " Level Up " allows you to increase your skill levels for as little as 6 USD per book or video. ALL eBooks and Videos are just $10 or less -- the more you choose to learn, the more you save: Any 1 or 2 eBooks/Videos -- $10 each Any 3-5 eBooks/Videos -- $8 each Any 6 or more eBooks/Videos -- $6 each The discounts above are automatically applied in your cart when you add the correct number of titles. Offer ends October 2nd. Please click here to start leveling up . have a nice day @lex

For our 'blast from the past' series, I have dug up this little gem from September 2009, long before Siebel Open UI. Maybe it's still relevant even in Open UI, who knows? *** If you follow this blog on a frequent basis, you might have noticed my fondness for the Siebel Portal Framework and its  usefulness  in integrating Siebel with other systems, such as Google maps . Today, I would like to look at the outbound integration, that is delivering Siebel data to another web based application. One way to deliver Siebel data to external systems is using the SWE XML interface . You can experience this very easily by pasting the following URL in your browser address bar while the Siebel application is loaded (the below is for the Developer Web Client): http://localhost/start.swe?SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=Account+List+View&SWESetMarkup=XML The Account List View in XML The important thing in this URL is the SWESetMarkup command which we use to tell the SWE to produce XML inste...

'tis the season again to turn our heads (or travel) to San Francisco where Oracle hosts its major event, Oracle OpenWorld , from Sunday, 28th September to Thursday, 2nd October 2014. As usual, Siebel Essentials will try to digest the firehose of information and put into reasonably sized articles. This year, our friends and fellow bloggers Bruce and Richard are on the premises, so watch the On Demand Education blog for some Siebel related information too. Maybe it's not just Siebel that attracts the crowd... As a special service, we added a Twitter stream to our sidebar, so you can follow the event as it happens. If you tweet from the event, please use the #oow14 hashtag. If you cannot make it to OOW this year, ensure you have bookmarked the live 'On Demand' video channel where you can see and replay the major events and keynotes. have a nice OOW @lex

In continuation of our somewhat high-level 'back to school' series on Siebel Open UI we today tackle the big question "to script or not to script?". The attentive long-time visitor that you hopefully are to this humble blog, you might already know the answer (as in 'my answer'). Even if we now have Open UI and an ever-expanding cosmos of JavaScript API and third party libraries, the answer is still the same to me: "Stay away from script as far as you can." The seasoned Siebel veteran might shake his balding head now and bring up the usual antithesis: "Why bother with workflow, runtime events and predefined business services when we can just write a piece of code that 'just works' within the hour and be done with it?" And with Open UI, it is all about JavaScript, isn't it? No it's not. As with any complex enterprise framework it is all about understanding the framework and using its extensibility options the best we can to ac...

If you had one place where you would easily find all the Siebel related content you needed, would you go there? My fellow bloggers and friends Bruce Daley of the Siebel Observer and Richard Napier of On Demand Education  and me have been putting our heads together and came up with something we think is a nice little idea. The idea is to bundle the wealth of information about Siebel CRM like blog posts, news, job listings, events, trainings, webinars, example code or forums into one Siebel 'super' site. Of course this is a big decision and we would not want to act without hearing the voice of the Siebel community. So please take a minute and fill in the survey . You will be asked about what Siebel related content you're looking for on the web and how difficult you feel it to find. have a nice day @lex

Yesterday, Oracle announced that its board of directors has elected Larry Ellison - formerly CEO - to the position of Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board and appointed him the company's Chief Technology Officer. Oracle also announced that the function of CEO will be held by two senior executives. Safra Catz will serve as CEO for manufacturing, finance, and legal functions while Mark Hurd will continue to oversee the sales, service and vertical industry global business units. Read the full press release here International news sites are abuzz with the story and focus on Mr. Ellison's 37-year long leadership from which he now steps down. Larry Ellison, who turned 70 this year, announced: �Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me. All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future. Keeping this ...

When you are the proud owner of a new and shiny instance of Oracle Fusion Applications or Sales Cloud (formerly known as Fusion CRM), one of the first tasks you find yourself at is to load administrative and customer data from various sources. For cloud instances, there are basically two options of importing (and/or exporting) data: File based data import (FBDI) Web Services For mass/bulk data, file based import has many advantages over web services, which are typically chosen for message-based real-time integration with other systems. In the remainder of this short article, we will focus on FBDI and point out how Oracle assists you with the sometimes tedious task of creating 'the right' import file. For this task, Oracle provides import templates. Let's see where and how we can get them: My Oracle Support A logical conclusion is to go to My Oracle Support and search for "fusion import template" (or "cloud import template"). One of the support docs you w...

Bruce Daley, chief editor of the Siebel Observer informs us that he will present a webinar on the State of Siebel 2014 on September 23rd 2014 at 11:00 AM EST. Building on last year's successful State of Siebel address, this year's presentation helps Siebel customers and partners determine what different directions they can take their implementation and their careers in the light of Siebel Open UI. Is a Siebel Renaissance really taking place? Find out where you really stand in your career. You can register for the webinar here have a nice day @lex

Another month, another patchset. Last weekend, Oracle has released patchset 11 for Innovation Pack 2013 carrying the mystical number 8.1.1.11.11 (or 8.2.2.4.11). A quick glance at the Readme document (aka Installation Guide) puts this patchset into the 'lots of bugfixes' category. The list of bugs fixed spans across the entire product line with an emphasis on order management and Open UI (including the rather promising "Enhance JavaScript Performance for Open UI"). have a nice day @lex

When talking to customers and partners in the Oracle Siebel CRM realm, a lot of discussions soon reach the point of having to address some fears, uncertainties and doubts (FUD) about Oracle's direction and support for the CRM system we all know and love. Recently, Oracle has added some interesting public documents to their official  Oracle.com Siebel Page  in addition to webcasts and videos. The  Siebel Friends and Family letter  is a very personal address to the Siebel community and lists the major assertions from Oracle's competitors and the rebuttal. Click image to enlarge. Click here to read the full letter . I will not reiterate or comment on individual positions of the letter but the overall feeling is that Oracle will keep investing in Siebel. But Oracle has opened more channels to communicate their commitment to Siebel. On oracle.com, a  FAQ  document has been made available that addresses the same concerns as the family letter. The FAQ lists some r...

Despite of the openly misleading heading, we are going to discuss some official Siebel Open UI stuff. I get quite a lot of questions from students who are seeking documentation for 'all properties that I can use in Get()' or similar. So what we are talking about today is the presentation model's Get method , the values (i.e. the names of properties) you can pass to it and what you get in return. If you have made your way into the Siebel Open UI JavaScript realm, you sure came across this method somewhere. Accessing the so-called properties is a mandatory step in most customizations. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to introspect the current data set or access the control objects within an applet and so forth. Before we start, let me mention that this is officially documented in the Configuring Siebel Open UI guide in bookshelf ( exactly here ). So why do we engage in the seemingly futile exercise of repeating the documentation? Well, let's see: Assorted Properties (p...

In our 'Back to School' series we take the liberty of stepping back and taking a look at the big picture of Siebel Open UI. Today, it's time to talk about the learning curve associated with Open UI. Example of a learning curve. Source: Dries Buytaert The first thing I did when Siebel Open UI became available to me (in fall 2012) and I realized that JavaScript, HTML, jQuery and CSS are its building blocks, was that I researched some good books on jQuery and CSS and ordered them. Personally, I have always learned faster from a book than from online tutorials. Those books have served me well and with 2 years of practice on my back I feel rather confident but not yet a full-grown web developer. But I can combine my Siebel developer skills with my newly acquired web developer skills quite effectively (so I hope). Why did I think that JavaScript, HTML, jQuery and CSS are mandatory skills? Why didn't I have those skills already? The answer to the first question is: Open UI is...

The following is a cross-post from my co-worker Jeroen Burgers, who shares his experiences as an Oracle Implementation Advisor on his blog with the same name . In one of his recent articles, Jeroen picked up the topic of Siebel Predefined Queries (PDQ) and the impact they can have on performance. I am pleased that he agreed to publish his findings on Siebel Essentials. *** Ever had to deal with PDQs which required to fetch based on date functions such as Year-to-date or Month-to-date (or any related�)? I came across an implementation where a customer became very creative trying to resolve this. But the end-result was a terrible performance. Why? Because the PDQ could not be completely be executed as SQL. A generic implementation flaw in queries written by Siebel configurators or business analysts: misusing calculated fields to be used in e.g. search Expressions and PDQs. It can (or will) hammer performance. A lot. For example: Provide me all the Opportunities YTD. This was the original...

With the upcoming Siebel Innovation Pack 2014, the Siebel community is rightfully excited about Siebel Open UI. IP 2014 will be the fourth release (after 8.1.1.9 two years ago, 8.1.1.10 and IP 2013) and once it is generally available, there will be a lot of exciting things to write about. Siebel Open UI - now in 3D. Coming to a browser near you soon ;-) But here we are, still with IP 2013 and many customers contemplating if they should do 'the switch' from traditional Siebel web clients to the new Redeemer UI. In our 'back to school' series we also contemplate today and nurse some deep thoughts about what Open UI could do for us and what we should better not expect. What Open UI does for you There are many non-arguable points for Open UI such as: Open UI gives you browser independency : Un-chain your project from IE8 and ActiveX lock-in. The prospect of accessing all your Siebel data in any browser on any device is a truly compelling argument. It makes your application...