Siebel 8.2.2 – First Impressions

November 4, 2011 By 4 Comments

Well, I’ve downloaded 8.2.2 Public Sector from eDelivery and unzipped all I need. Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve found so far!

ImageCreator – no more!

Unzipping all the JAR files into a single location left me a bit confused. Where’s ImageCreator.exe? No more, from what I can see! There’s a wee batch file called ‘snic.bat’ that does the job instead. Simply open a command prompt, set JAVA_HOME and run snic.bat. Behold, the new face of ImageCreator:

ImageCreator – but not as you know it

First thing to note – it works great in Windows 7 64-bit! WOO HOO! Thank you Oracle! :)

All the familiar options are there, so I opt to create installers for the Siebel Enterprise, Tools, Web Client and SWE. English language picked, it creates the installers. Simple, awesome, it works. Hurrah!

Installation

That done, I have two freshly created Windows 2008 R2 VMs ready to roll – one for the App Server / SWE and one for the database. I’ve taken the liberty of installing Oracle 11g in preparation – I hope you don’t mind! I’ve also set aside a Windows 7 64-bit VM for Siebel Client and Tools installations, with the 11g client already installed.

So, the installations. Are they now supported on Windows Server 2008? Well… Yes! The installation process for Server components now follows the OUI method of the Client and Tools installers for 8.1:

Familiar installer

Cool! Much better than the old 8.1 installers. Working great in 64-bit 2008 R2 too – no complaints about incompatibility!

Configuration

Launching the config shortcuts reveals a make over of the configuration wizards, in keeping with the installer look and feel. Everything works as before but it’s much cleaner and much more compatible.

Clean and compatible configuration

Initial Gateway Configuration failed and I don’t know why. You’ll notice that the file system structure of the installation looks very ‘Oracle’ like and far less ‘Siebel’ like – the configuration log files reside in a ‘cfgtools’ folder though I could find no error to speak of in any of the files. I was unable to uninstall the Gateway too – again, no trace of an error in the log files but the configuration wizard refused to complete successfully. Enterprise configuration ran without a hitch.

It’s at this point I will mention that the ODBC datasource for the Enterprise was created in the 32-bit subsystem. That is, checking in the registry (or through the SysWOW version of odbcad32.exe), you’ll see the ODBC entries in the WOW (Windows in Windows – the 32-bit subsystem supporting 32-bit apps in 64-bit Windows) area. This is a disappointment and certainly suggests no native 64-bit support. Checking the binaries in starting the Siebel Server and Gateway, I can see quite clearly that they are running in the 32-bit subsystem so are most certainly not native 64-bit. :(

GRANTUSR.SQL has received a well deserved make over – a far larger script prompts for more detailed information, performs more checks and is generally easier and safer to use. Excellent stuff.

SWE installation still does not support IIS 7.5 natively and requires the IIS 6 metabase compatibility to be enabled.

The rest of the configuration of the Database Server, Siebel Server and SWE are much the same as before.

Tools and Web Client

Familiar installation dialogs for Tools and Web Client. The only addition is the ability to sign up for Oracle updates, in line with newer Oracle product installations. Windows 7 is now seen as a supported OS, so no compatibility problems this time around. Nice!

Finally, support for Windows 7

 No problems with regsrvr hanging on the Client installation but the installer has crashed at 100% – ‘Updating registry key … AutoStartOnDisconnect’. I’ve had to kill it. :( Running again ‘As Administator’ seemed to get around this – still not great, thought. I want to be able to install client software without faffing around with UAC.

I’ve had to stop here – the ‘All Inclusive’ keys on the the Oracle License Key page are yet to include 8.2.2 keys, so I can’t go any further.

I’ll post again when I get chance to investigate some of the functional and technical changes present in 8.2.2.

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Filed Under: Installation, Public Sector, Siebel, Technology, Windows 2008, Windows 7 Tagged With: , , ,

Siebel 8.2.2 Released via eDelivery

November 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’ve just noticed that Siebel 8.2.2 Public Sector is now available on eDelivery – under ‘Windows 64-bit’ no less!

Does this mean full 64-bit support for Siebel Servers?! Can we finally say goodbye to 3.2 GiB and PAE? I wonder what other, exciting features we can expect to see!

Am downloading now with update to follow – stay tuned! :)

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Filed Under: News, Public Sector, Siebel, Technology Tagged With: ,

OBIEE 11g and OBIA 7.9.6.3

August 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Been a while since my last post – parenthood is a full time job during which I still need to do my full time job! ;)

I’ve been installing OBIEE11g and OBI Applications 7.9.6.3 recently. I built a 64-bit Windows 2008 VM, stuck Oracle 11g R2 on there and went about installing:

  • OBIEE 11g
  • Informatica 9.0.1
  • DAC 10g

I’m posting about this because I found an amazing site that I used almost exclusively to do the installation:

http://gerardnico.com/wiki/obia/obia

It documents, in huge detail, the steps to perform a complete install on both Windows and Linux platforms. I’d highly recommend visiting this site and going through the steps yourself – the set up is lengthy and there are a number of manual tasks to complete. It took me almost 2 days to get everything up and working – really neat now it’s done though!

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Filed Under: Installation, OBIEE, Public Sector, Reporting, Siebel Tagged With: , , ,

Siebel Public Sector 8.2.1 Released

June 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Just a quickie!

I noticed recently that Siebel Public Sector 8.2.1 is available for download on Oracle eDelivery.

Not sure on the content but it looks like a step towards General Availability (GA) of 8.2 Public Sector. Alas, it’s still classed as Controlled Availability (CA) so you’ll have to talk to your Oracle Sales Team in order to obtain permission to download – Oracle are being very selective about who gets access to this.

Interestingly, Oracle are terming this a ‘diversified release’ of Siebel Public Sector. Not entirely sure what this means, but I suspect 8.2 will come with different licensing options to 8.1 Public Sector. It seems to be a diverged code stream of 8.1 aimed solely at the Social Services area within Public Sector. More than likely existing Public Sector customers will be encouraged to stick to the 8.1 stream – 8.1.1.5 has only just recently been released. The specialised functionality in 8.2 (Oracle Policy Automation and Effective Dating spring to mind) means it’s going to have quite a limited audience.

If I can get my hands on a copy, I’ll post up some comments.

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Filed Under: Public Sector, Siebel, Technology Tagged With: , ,

Configuring Dynamics CRM 2011

April 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’m aware that I’ve deviated from Siebel recently. I’m really interested in technology and expanding my horizons, so I really want to finish up with Dynamics CRM before I get back to the Siebel upgrade. I’m hoping this is useful to readers as there really is now some serious competition to the Siebel CRM space!

I wanted to just quickly share my experience with configuring Dynamics CRM 2011. I mentioned before some of the common tasks associated with a Siebel config job:

  • Field and database changes
  • Applets
  • Workflow

And I had a brief look into how easy such changes are in Dynamics. The answer? Really easy! Puts Siebel Tools to shame!

Dynamics CRM 2011 has, for those with appropriate access, a ‘Customize’ ribbon button. From here, you can pretty much do anything:

Customize Entity is like checking out the BC, it’s corresponding Links, Applets and Views in Siebel Tools. From here, you can:

  1. Configure localisation, defining ‘display values’ for various aspects of the entity
  2. Add fields (backend database is handled for you – no need to define underlying columns) and define translations for the field names into any language or dialect of your choosing.
  3. Modify forms (Applets to you and I) with simple drag and drop
  4. Define relationships with other entities (think Link definitions)

The list goes on – there’s pretty much everything here that you’d find in Siebel Tools. Pretty impressive considering this is still looking at the Thin Client. Here are some screenshots of the various configuration pages:

Deploying changes is as simple as clicking the ‘Publish Entity’ or ‘Publish All’ buttons – this will make your changes instantly available to users. No mucking around with Repositories, SRFs and manual steps. It really is impressive.

As far as Workflow and automation is concerned, I’ve not delved deep enough to understand the possibilities and limitations. Perhaps later on in the year we can take a look.

From now, let’s get back to Siebel and the upgrade process. I hopefully have a 7.8 to 8.2 project coming up very soon so I’ll be keen to share my experiences with you then!

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Filed Under: Dynamics CRM 2011, Public Sector, Technology Tagged With: , , ,
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