We recently upgraded one of our clients from 7.8.2.4 SIA to 7.8.2.8 SIA. There were a number of reasons for doing this, the main one being support for IE 7 which was being deployed throughout the organisation. We were also looking forward to some bug fixes and perhaps a performance tweak here and there as well as stability on the new browser platform.
Alas, no such luck.
Within a week of deployment, we had notched up around 8 internal help desk calls resulting in 6 My Oracle Support Service Requests – all defects introduced by the patch release. It was terrible: far from delivering stability to the users, as we’d expected with the move to IE7 in addition to the patch, we ended up delivering a host of usability problems.
We’d run a full regression test pack with positive results, treating the patch as any other code release. The problems that we found were with core Siebel functionality that we just did not include in the regression test pack. Create a new record and want to undo? Not with patch 8 you can’t – the ‘Undo Record’ functionality was accidentally disabled. Want to run Product Configurator? Sorry, it’s broken – some Repository changes and a new SRF will fix that, so another Production outage required for deployment.
The list goes on and has only just started to shrink with the release of 7.8.2.13 into Production – not without it’s own problems, but I won’t get in to that now.
It should not be like this and Oracle really seem to be letting the Siebel quality control slip. I’d like to think that Tom Siebel would have been mortified by a patch release that broke fundamental functionality. We find it worrying for the Siebel community as a whole if this trend of buggy releases persists.
What are your experiences of patching Siebel? Have you noticed any change in the quality of service since Oracle took over?
We upgraded to Salesforce.com. No problems since.
Hi Ryan,
I registered as a Salesforce.com developer a couple of months back and was really impressed by it! Really easy to develop functionality and deploy through test to Production. I think it’s a really good option for small to medium sales / service solutions, where one can live with a lot of standard functionality.
How was the migration process from Siebel to SF.com? Did you do a separate functional migration, in addition to data? How did it go? I’d be really interested to hear of your experiences!