siebel

There are few Siebel books on the market, so when I found out about a book by the author of one of my favorite Siebel blogs , I wanted to write a review right away. Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Installation and Management , by Alexander Hansal, is an introduction to many of the key administrative tasks in short, easy-to-understand sections. Some of the sections of the book are quite strong. The chapter on Siebel Remote is very good. It covers the various types of mobile clients for various users, the process of extracting the mobile client for a user, initializing local databases, keeping them synchronized, and many more important tasks. In a 25 page chapter, Hansal provides an overview of Siebel Remote that an administrator can read before diving into the Siebel Bookshelf guide that is more than 10 times as long. Another chapter on system monitoring offers a good introduction to that topic, including a pretty detailed overview of SARM analyzer functionality. Some chapters are weaker. Th...

Even when a Siebel implementation does not need to be SOX compliant, it is still important to develop and maintain processes to reduce errors and fraud. Separation of duties (SoD) is an important security principle in any enterprise application environment. For example, it is often best to prevent Siebel Developers from having administrative access, and to prevent Siebel Administrators from changing code. One potential vulnerability is that command-line server manager connections require a username and password that authenticate against the Siebel database. People with this information can use a third-party tool to access and manipulate the Siebel database. In a production environment, administrators need these passwords, but they should be restricted as much as possible, especially from developers. Scripts invoking the Siebel Server Manager command-line interface can be a powerful tool for automating server tasks, but connecting to the command-line interface on a Windows server r...