siebel

One of the most eye-striking novelties in the fresh-from-the-oven Innovation Pack 2014 certainly is the new global theme for Siebel Open UI which goes by the name of 'Aurora'. Siebel Call Center (complete with good ol' iHelp and the new Communications panel) "Aurora", the  Roman goddess of dawn  is a noble patroness for this new theme. So let's get a little bit deeper into the new theme... One Theme to Rule them All Yes, that's right. At one blow, we now have a single, common theme for all Open UI enabled applications. This includes the relatively young family of Siebel Mobile Applications, all former HI applications and the new CX Partner Portal or Self Service Portal applications. For mobile applications, this means to say goodbye to any mobile-specific renderer that used jQuery Mobile (more on that in a separate article) and say hello to all the desktop features on a tablet. Siebel Sales mobile application, Aurora theme. Ah and yes, gone are the days of...

From time to time and for various reasons, we must be able to identify a record in a Siebel database as either belonging to the ever-growing set of Siebel seed data or as having been created by the customer. Probably the easiest way to identify a record as seed data is to use the ROW_ID value. For example, let's go to the Product Administration view and run a query such as the following. [Id] LIKE "0*" The above search specification will retrieve all records that have a ROW_ID beginning with "0". The leading zero is a typical seed data indicator (and used in dataimp input files such as seed_locale.inp ). After typing/pasting the above in any text control and executing the query, we get a list of records that should be present in any Siebel database such as these three products. Invoking the About Record command reveals that the active record is really ancient as most seed data records have a CREATED timestamp of January, 1st 1980. Reversing the query of course...

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by feeling totally privileged of working with so many brilliant people. Last week, fellow book author and Oraclean Duncan Ford published the Siebel Open UI Code Template Generator . I am sure the Siebel Open UI community will be more than grateful for this JSFiddle project as it allows you to quickly pull a template for any type of Presentation Model or Physical Renderer. This way you can get started quickly and without the hassle of keeping static files. The generator is easy to use, let's have a quick walk-through. First, you select the type of template (PM or PR) and the type of object (for example for a desktop form applet). Next, enter a name for your new class and decide whether you want comments and/or basic logging. Now simply copy the code and paste it into a new file in an editor of your choice. Save the file, using the same name as of the class (suffixed with 'PM' or 'PR'), to the siebel/custom folder in your developer web clien...

Two weeks ago, at Oracle OpenWorld 2014, Oracle held several sessions which focused on the future of Siebel CRM - the world's most complete CRM , as we call it. Our friend and fellow blogger Richard was at the premises and shared many exciting articles (and screenshots) with us. Now that the dust and excitement has somewhat settled, it's time to reiterate Oracle's statements. Siebel CRM is at the Center of the Cloud (and it's not Alone) An image says more than a thousand words. The following is taken from an Oracle presentation. Personally, I think that this is the most important diagram for Oracle Applications customers at the moment. Oracle, their customers and partners are on their way of bringing decade-long investments in gargantuan on-premise deployments of eBusiness Suite, JDEdwards, PeopleSoft or Siebel CRM to the ever so promising cloud. And the reality is that for most deployments of huge enterprise-class applications with millions or even billions of transac...

Welcome back to the second and final part of our speech to text tutorial (complete with awesome fonts). In the first part , we created a custom PR for the Contact Form Applet and put all the Font Awesome files in the right places. Today it's time to tackle the PR code in earnest. Remember we want to achieve the following: Display a microphone button in a text field using a scalable icon by  Font Awesome Allow speech input using the  HTML5 Web Speech API Animate the microphone icon during recording with  CSS animation Write the recognized text to a field according using the Siebel Open UI API (of course) Play back the recorded text using the  HTML5 Speech Synthesis API So let's open our primordial physical renderer and implement the following code inside the ShowUI method: Click to enlarge (yeah I know, it's just a screenshot) Grab the full code here . Let's walk through the code line by line: First, we 'get' the GetControls property to initialize the controls ...

If you have been following the various articles in the Siebel Open UI realm over the past two years you have probably seen a demonstration of speech recognition to provide field values via the device microphone. The example code with this demo boils down to one line like this: $('input[name="' + controlInputName + '"]').attr("x-webkit-speech","x-webkit-speech"); The above code is adding the x-webkit-speech attribute to a text input control so that we can simply click or tap a microphone icon and start speaking. Note that only Google Chrome supported this feature. Supported? Read on... As you also probably know, this humble writer and his fellow authors are working on the Siebel Open UI Developer's Handbook (to be released early 2015). Of course, we aim to provide as many working examples as possible and the speech-to-text demo is something we have on our list. However, while creating the demo code for the book we found to our dismay t...

With great delight we follow the news from the US west coast, where fellow Siebel blogger and friend Richard from On Demand Education managed to get a seat in what we imagine to be a standing-room session. In his article ( please click here to read the full article and see all 'screenshots' ), Richard points out the following important bits of information for everyone working with Siebel CRM. 84% of the customer base is on the latest Siebel release (8.1.1. or 8.2.2) Siebel CRM is a vital part of Oracle's CX strategy The roadmap for Siebel now extends to 2022 and beyond In the (very) near future, we will see the release of IP 2014 which will provide fodder for many a post (not to mention that the Open UI related enhancements will make it into our planned book). Here are some key announcements for IP 2014: Responsive Web Design (RWD) for Siebel Open UI will enable customers to use any Siebel application on any device. New 'container' app for mobile applications with e...

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...

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

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...

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...

Remember the 'see-through' applets example? If not (and if you're too lazy to click the link), it demonstrates how we can display field-level metadata with a simple double-click on a form applet. Now, whenever I demonstrate this to my students and customers, they really like it. But then always comes the question, what if an unsuspecting end user double-clicks by accident? Of course, we don't want to confuse end users (and the helpdesk staff) with an applet that looks like this: Click to enlarge. So how can we restrict Open UI functionality to certain users or groups such as super users or analysts? One possible answer to this questions is found in the Manifest Expressions view. Let's assume - for the sake of simplicity - that you have assigned positions like 'Siebel Administrator' or 'Open UI Administrator' to some of your fellow employees. With the following custom manifest expression you can easily provide conditional logic to load certain JavaS...

Welcome to part 1 of our 'back to school' series on Siebel Open UI. Today we are taking a helicopter ride to get the 'big picture' of the components that contribute to the Siebel Open UI architecture. As indicated in the kick-off post for this series, we keep the tone nice and easy, just in case you are new to Open UI and just started your career as an Open UI developer. But nonetheless, we will dispense some hooks and bait for the seasoned veteran ;-) Let's start with a listing of all the ingredients that make up a good Siebel Open UI discussion: Siebel Repository Manifest Data Web Templates Siebel Web Engine Object Manager Web Server JavaScript Cascading Style Sheets Browser As you might discern, the list is somehow sorted in reverse order. As this is an architectural discussion, we'll start with the foundation rather than the roof. So here we go: 1. The Siebel Repository If you want to define a Siebel view, you need applets. Where are they defined? Of course ...