Now, I know this is a ‘technology’ blog and I’m usually loath to get into non-technical subjects or discussions, but this is important!

You’ll notice two words in the post title that are really, really important when considering a Siebel upgrade: ‘Plan’ and ‘Project’.

First things first: your Siebel upgrade will not take a week. It won’t take a month. It probably won’t take 3 months! In fact, if you can execute a Siebel upgrade from start to finish in less than 6 months, you’ll be doing pretty well, considering. It is possible – if you’re going from 7.7 to 7.8 or 8.1 to 8.2 or if your Siebel implementation is almost entirely vanilla. Even then, it’s going to be non trivial.

I can’t emphasise this enough – you have to plan and treat the upgrade as a project. If you do it any other way the upgrade will fail, I can almost guarantee it.

So, a few pointers before we get into the technicalities of the upgrade process:

1. Create a plan
2. Consider other elements of the upgrade, such as Actuate to BIP and Analytics to OBI
3. Identify key resources – you’ll want a PM, test manager, testers, a DBA, Siebel and OBI technical resources and all the supporting management bodies that you would have on any other project
4. Build your environments
5. Run the upgrade
6. Scrap what you’ve done and run it again
7. Run it again and again until you could upgrade in your sleep
8. Regression test over at least two test cycles
9. Test, test and test again!
10. Plan how you’re going to go live
11. Be glad you told your boss 6 months and not 4 weeks
12. Create cutover plans
13. Rehearse the cutover
14. Rehearse it again and again
15. Go live
16. Upgrade your development, test and UAT systems
17. Wipe the sweat from your brow and admire your new, slightly bluer, Siebel system

Oracle have produced some guidelines and best practice documentation that I have found to be very, very useful. Check out what they have to say and remember:

A Siebel upgrade is non-trivial! There is no ‘install.exe’ that will magically do it for you.

Phew, rant over! Next time you hear from me I’ll be back in full tech mode and we’ll start to cover the aspects of a Siebel technical upgrade.

I thought I’d spend some time over the coming months covering off the Siebel 8 upgrade process.

I’ve been planning and executing a 7.8 to 8.1 Public Sector upgrade for a while now and thought I might share some of my experiences. We’ll have a look at

1. Planning and preparing for the upgrade
2. Technical upgrade, upgrep and upphys
3. Post upgrade tasks
4. Enterprise configuration
5. Preparing for, and executing, cut over

Hopefully this will make for some interesting discussion and commentary. Until then, have a great weekend!