Alex Hansal and Packt Publishing have recently released Alex’s second book on Siebel CRM – The Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Developers Handbook. Packt have, once again, kindly sent me a copy for review. My first impressions? I’m mightily impressed!
Since the dawn of time, the only reference guide that an aspiring Siebel developer could rely on was Siebel Bookshelf.
Don’t get me wrong – Siebel Bookshelf is awesome. It’s the MSDN of Siebel and really is all you could ever need to be a successful Siebel developer and administrator. However, last time I checked, Siebel Bookshelf consisted of literally hundreds of documents – each with hundreds of pages. It’s too much – I’ll go my whole Siebel career without reading half of that. Short of attending the official Oracle training (I’ll get back to this, don’t you worry) there really is nothing out there that provides a digestible introduction to developing a Siebel solution.
Alex’s new book aims to achieve this and does so admirably.
Where Alex’s previous title, ”Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Installation and Management”, looked at installation and administration this book is aimed solely at Siebel developers. I’ll leave it to you to check out the contents in detail – you can do so via Amazon’s preview options – but the gist of the contents is as follows:
- Siebel Tools and the Siebel Repository
- User Interface development and configuration
- Business entity configuration and physical data
- Integration
- Workflow and Scripting
- Deployment
Beginners to Siebel can really benefit from the introductory chapters – there are plenty of step by step guides, supported by a fictional ‘customer’ with requirements that are defined in one of the early chapters. More seasoned developers will still benefit from a refresh of core concepts and a delve into more complex topics such as User Properties and advanced scripting techniques.
UI customization is covered in great detail as are Business Objects, Business Components and all associated objects such as Links, Fields and Pick Lists. The Integration and Workflow sections include a really useful step by step guide to Web Services which I found particularly interesting.
I really enjoyed the chapter on User Properties. If Siebel developers used half of the available user props out there, the volume of scripting in customer solutions would drop dramatically. There is so much functionality in there that you can tap into with a simple name and value pair. This is a brilliant reference chapter to commonly used, and some lesser known, User Props out there in Siebel 8.1/8.2.
Scripting is covered but not in a massive amount of depth. This is to be expected and the Siebel Bookshelf eScript guide should always be your first port of call for this anyway. It’s great to see it included with some nice simple and useful examples.
Finally, ADM is referenced briefly – as it was so in Alex’s previous tome. It’s a shame that this component is not covered in greater details as I’m still yet to see a concise and decisive guide to this technology that is really helpful for migrating non-repository configuration items. It’s a minor gripe and by no means detracts from the rest of the book.
I always end up comparing independent Siebel publications to two things:
- Siebel Bookshelf
- The Oracle Siebel Core Consulting Training Course
Siebel Bookshelf is, and always will be, the only reference guide you will ever need as a Siebel professional. It’s detailed, lengthy and not always well presented and this book does a brilliant job in addressing that. Everything is just detailed enough to be useful and structured just right, so as to be understandable and readable.
To become a good Siebel developer, with an in depth understanding of the framework and functionality present within the ever growing Siebel product set, I really do think that instructor led training is an absolute must. This book is an awesome companion to that training but is not a direct replacement. However, given where we are with the economy and outsourcing, it’s perfectly understandable that some would-be developers will never get an opportunity to attend such training. In these circumstances, this book is ideal.
Overall, I’d highly recommend this as a developers companion guide. If you’re new to Siebel, it’s going to be invaluable and experts would do well not to shun the little gems of information scattered throughout.
The book is available now from Amazon or direct from Packt Publishing
