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It’s been a busy time for me over the last couple of weeks. However, I’m working on a new Siebel 8.1 site at the moment and I’ve started delving into Assignment Manager – specifically around the Cases and Activities for now, but we’ll see how things progress.
My articles will be less regular than before, but I’m hoping to release a series on Assignment Manager in Siebel 8.1 over the coming month or so. In the mean time, please peruse the active articles and feel free to add some comments. Even the likes of ‘We deployed SAP CRM and it’s brilliant!’ or ‘Cloud computing – death to Siebel!’ are welcome – I’m always up for a bit of CRM based discussion! 
Configuring a Wireless application is very much like any other app development task in Siebel Tools. The Wireless application is made up of a number of object types. Again, I’m using Service as an example, but this could be substituted for Sales or whatever:
Applets and Views are named according to the relationship that they represent (parent / child) and whether they are list (Display) or form (Detail) type . For example:
SWLS Service Account Activity Display View
This is the Wireless Service (SWLS Service) view that for a parent Account will show a list of Activities
Applets, Views and Screens are all built up in the same way as you’d expect and use a specific Wireless Web Template to allow display on the smaller device screens. Drill down, via Drill Down objects, Picklists are all supported out of the box. More complex functionality, such as buttons, are handled via User Properties on the applet level controls. Note that these are currently undocumented, so a degree of trawling through the vanilla configuration is unavoidable. You’ll soon understand what’s going on but analysis of the existing config against vanilla functionality is highly recommended.
Here are a few useful tips:
My recommendation is to modify existing applets and copy existing applets instead of creating new ones from scratch. When creating my Case configuration, I copied the existing Service Request objects and modified them accordingly.
Give it a go and feel free to post comments with problems or success stories!
Siebel Wireless can be tweaked to support a number of different target devices. BlackBerries, iPhones, Nokias and so on, all have different amounts of screen real estate and their browsers all have different capabilities. Siebel Wireless offers you the ability to tweak the layout and functionality of pages delivered to a device, based on the browser user agent.
To set up various capabilities, follow the steps below. I’m using BlackBerry as an example, but the same rules apply for all device and browser types:
A great way to test what you’ve done is with Firefox. Within Firefox, you can configure the browser to ‘pretend’ to be any number of different user agents. For example, to test a BlackBerry 9550:
As you can probably see, it’s really easy to set up and use Siebel Wireless out of the box. Delivering the same application to multiple devices is also made easy via Browser Capabilities – and we haven’t even touched Siebel Tools yet!
Coming up next, we’ll look at the Siebel Wireless Tools configuration and I’ll talk through adding your own functionality to the existing application.
Getting started couldn’t be easier! I’m using Siebel Service as an example – Siebel Sales is exactly the same but uses the ‘Siebel Sales Wireless’ Object Manager.
Follow these steps to enable Siebel Wireless:
That’s it! You can access the vanilla Wireless Service application via the URL: http://<Siebel Web Server Host>/wpserv_enu/. For a slightly more impressive demo, you can use the TestiPhone iPhone Simulator to display your mobile site!
In the next post, I’ll look at how to configure Siebel to support multiple devices and browsers, without any Siebel Tools configuration!
Siebel Wireless has been around for a while now. Along with Siebel Handheld and Siebel Mobile, it has been part of a number of solutions for delivering CRM via mobile computing. There are pros and cons of each as you’d expect. For example, Siebel Mobile runs off a local database while Siebel Wireless is a connected solution. Siebel Remote works great if you don’t need run time data but Siebel Wireless, which will deliver data in real time, is no good if you can’t get connected.
With mobile communications technology advancing as it is, delivering better coverage and faster devices with more screen real estate, the Siebel Wireless option is becoming an attractive one. It provides a cut down pure HTML version of your ‘full fat’ Siebel application and delivers it directly to a mobile device, be it Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia or whatever. It’s a very simple solution but very powerful at the same time. Siebel 8 has delivered a much improved (and much prettier!) Siebel Wireless solution when you put it up against earlier efforts.
I’ve spent some time developing a Case Management Wireless solution that builds on the vanilla Wireless Service configuration. In the next article or two I’d like to share my experience and knowledge around this area. Demo’ing a POC system to board members, via iPhone or a big screen via RIM’s Blackberry simulators, will be sure to raise an eyebrow or two I can assure you!
Stay tuned!
Last time we talked about the concepts involved in authentication using Active Directory. This week, we’ll have a look at how to apply these concepts by creating an authentication profile in Siebel, for use by an Object Manager.
First up, go into Site Map > Administration – System Configuration > Enterprises > Profile Configuration
If you query for Profile = ADSI*, you’ll see a vanilla AD security adapter configuration. If you’re going to try changing stuff, why not take a copy of this so that you can always refer back to the original.
So, here are the values you’ll need to fill in:
| Parameter | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Server Name | The name of your directory server | intra.myco.local |
| Port | The port on which your server is listening | 389 |
| Base DN | The container which will act as the root of your user objects | OU=USERS, DC=INTRA, DC=MYCO, DC=LOCAL |
| Application User DN | An AD user that has the ability to add and modify existing objects | CN=ADSIUSER, OU=USERS, DC=INTRA, DC=MYCO, DC=LOCAL |
| Application Password | Password for the user above | xxxxxx |
| Propagate Change | Whether or not changes in Siebel will propagate down to AD | True |
| Shared DB User Name | User name of the DB account which is used to access the Siebel Database | SADMIN |
| Shared DB Password | Password for the user above | xxxxxx |
Once you’re happy with this configuration, you need simply tell your OM component to use the new profile for authentication. Do this through Site Map > Administration – System Configuration > Servers > Components > Parameters. Simply set the follow parameter values:
| Parameter | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Security Adapter Mode | Either ADSI, DB or LDAP ADSI | ADSI |
| Security Adapter Name | Name of the profile that you created above | intADSISecAdapt |
That’s it!
You can trouble shoot by setting event logging on the OM, specifically around the Security Adapter Log and Security Adapter Manager events. I’d also recommend reading through the Siebel Security Guide in Bookshelf.
Please feel free to post if you’re having problems with enabling AD authentication in Siebel or if you have anything else to add.
You might have noticed that the world of Siebel is becoming a lot more open. Five or so years ago, Siebel kept their cards very close to their chests: there were very few blogs, no discussion forums or independently published books. Outside of SupportWeb and Bookshelf, you were on your own.
Whether it’s changing times or Oracle’s intervention, the technology is opening right up: blogs galore, open discussion forums hosted by Oracle, free downloads from eDelivery and several books hitting the shelves of Amazon. These are good times for the community and gives us a great opportunity to share our knowledge and skills and help each other out.
So I’ve posted some articles, garnered some responses and hopefully helped a few people out.
What I’d like to know from anyone visiting is, what would you like me to post about? Are there any specific areas that you’d like me to cover? Any burning questions you’d like me to answer?
I’m open to suggestions as at the end of the day this site is about informing and helping other people. Comments or emails welcome!
One of the more complex installation and system administration functions of a Siebel 7 or 8 environment is authentication. Back in the old days, many Siebel sites used out of the box database authentication which required little or no additional configuration. Nowadays, we want to leverage existing company directories to cut down on unnecessary configuration and maintenance, while also providing a friendlier ‘single sign on’ experience to users. In this post, I want to cover off some of the concepts around Active Directory authentication within Siebel and hopefully show you that it is really not as complicated as it seems. It’s a big topic, so we’ll cover principles in this post and the finer details of setting things up in Siebel next time.
I’m going to concentrate on Microsoft Active Directory here but the principles can be applied to LDAP or other options that you care to mention.
First up, there are some important concepts and pieces of information that you need to understand:
You can define a security adapter profile in a number of ways:
As ever, Bookshelf is here to help and you can find all this information in the Security Guide.
Next time, we’ll take a look at choosing these values and how to use them to set up AD authentication in Siebel.
I’m still struggling to get overly excited by the iPad! Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone: I struggled for 18 months with a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone before I caved and have been won over by it. I’ll never go back!
The iPad, however, I just can’t quite get my head around. It’s not an eReader and it’s not a laptop. It’s somewhere in between and I can’t yet see a niche there that needs to be filled. If it had come with a bit of ‘oomph’ and MacOS X then I’d be sorely tempted. To me, it’s still just a big iPhone and, having grown accustomed to the apps available on that platform, I really struggled to find anything to do when I had a go on the company iPad. Still, I don’t doubt it will be big and two generations more down the line, there might be something worth buying.
Anyway, I digress – Oracle have announced support for the Siebel CRM platform on iPad, which is really interesting! Having no Flash or ActiveX to play with, this is obviously a big change for us and is a good sign that Siebel is still going strong in the minds of the Oracle marketing bods. With a bit of luck, Oracle will be demo’ing this to us sometime and, if they do, I’ll be sure to report back.
After my last article, I’ve been wrestling with the installing documentation for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications – the new name for Siebel Analytics. I’m pleased to say that, a few niggles aside, the process of getting this up and running is pretty straight forward! I’ve summarised the steps below and included some details of the issues I came up against and how I resolved them.
After downloading and installing the basics, there were a few additional bits and pieces that were required:
That’s about it really – following the instructions from the Oracle BI Applications documentation was surprisingly simple and successful!
Please feel free to post your experiences.
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