Avoid Several Restarts of Siebel (SWSE) Web Server After Each Build

When changes made to the browser scripts, customized images, style sheets, help files these files are copied to the respective folders under Siebel root/ Siebel Server/ Webmaster. To synchronize the changes to the web server, The Siebel web server usually restarted.


Restarting the Siebel web servers after each build is tedious task when you have several builds from development to testing or other environments.

Alternatively you can use UpdateWebImages!

UpdateWebImages! Interesting, I will explain step by step below.

Type the below URL in the browser and hit the enter key. That’s it.
http://host:port/application/start.swe?SWECmd=UpdateWebImages&SWEPassword=WebUpdateProtectionKey
Host = The name of the Web server machine.
Port = The Web server listen port (not required if using the default port, 80).
Application = Any Siebel application hosted by this Web server (such as callcenter_enu, sales_enu, and so on).
WebUpdateProtectionKey = The unencrypted version of the Web Update Protection Key, which is defined in the eapps.cfg file by the WebUpdatePassword parameter.

To know more about Siebel Web Server

Industry Specific BI – What's the common denominator?

My previous post on business process fundamentals concluded with a friendly exhortation to BI practitioners inciting them to view their craft from the point of optimizing business process.

So the next time you are involved in any BI endeavor, please ask this question to yourself and the people involved in the project – “So which business process is this BI project supposed to optimize, why and how?” I define ‘Optimization’ loosely as anything that leads to bottom-line or top-line benefits.

Business processes by its very definition belong to the industry domain. Companies have their own business processes – some of them are standard across firms in that particular domain and many of them are unique to specific companies. Efficiency of business processes is a source of competitive advantage and the fact that ERP vendors like SAP has special configurations for every industry illustrates this point. So by corollary, for BI to be effective in optimizing business processes, it has to be tied to specific industry needs creating what can be called as “Verticalized Business Intelligence”. (V-BI in short)

At Hexaware’s Business Intelligence & Analytics practice (the company and team that I belong to), we have taken the concept of V-BI pretty seriously and have built solutions aimed at industry verticals. You can view our vertical specific BI offering at this link and we definitely welcome your comments on that.

Though Verticalized BI is a powerful idea, companies typically need an “analytics anchor point” to establish a BI infrastructure before embarking on their domain specific BI initiatives. The analytics anchor point, mentioned above, should have the following characteristics:

• All organizations across domains should have the necessity to implement it
• Business process associated with these analytics needs to be fairly standardized and should be handled by experts
• Should involve some of the most critical stakeholders within the organization as the success of this first initiative will lay the foundation for future work

Based on my experience in providing consulting services for organizations in laying down an Enterprise BI roadmap, I feel that “Financial Analytics” has all the right characteristics to become the analytics anchor point for companies. Financial Analytics, the common denominator, typically comprises of:

• General Ledger Analysis – (also known as Financial Statements Analysis)
• Profitability Analysis (Customer / Product Profitability etc.)
• Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting
• Monitoring & Controlling – The Dashboards & Scorecards
• General Ledger Consolidation

The above mentioned areas are also classified as Enterprise Performance Management. The convergence of Performance Management and BI is another interesting topic (recent announcements of Microsoft have made this subject doubly interesting!) and I will write about it in my future posts.

In my humble opinion, the prescription for Enterprise BI is:

• Select one or more areas of Financial Analytics (as mentioned above) as your first target for Enterprise BI.
• During the process of completing step 1, establish the technology and process infrastructure for BI in the organization
• Add your industry specific BI initiatives (Verticalized Business Intelligence) as you move up the curve

I, for one, truly believe in the power of Verticalized BI to develop solutions that provide the best fit between business and technology. That business and IT people can sit across the table and look at each other with mutual respect is another important non-trivial benefit.

Thanks for reading. Do you have any other analytics anchor points for organizations to jumpstart their BI initiatives? Please do share your thoughts.

Read More About  Industry Specific BI

New Mile Stone in Workforce Modelling and Intelligence – Orgplus

It was the last quarter of 2007 when we had a discussion on the workforce modelling and intelligence(refer -”workforce modelling and intelligence” post) in our pitstop. Now, the news is – Orgplus enterprise is named as the top HR product of the year 2008.


Yes,.. In a latest news release by pressreleasepoint, the author states that ““OrgPlus allows managers to easily visualize and understand their talent data, and if an organization is growing, reorganizing or merging, OrgPlus rapidly models these changes using accurate financial, workforce, and budget data so HR, finance and executive teams can make better decisions to impact overall corporate objectives.”

The Integration between the PeopleSoft HCM 9.0 and Orgplus was much awaited to be validated by Oracle and now Orgplus had recieved the integration validation. In short, the integration revolution within the HR IT Products seems to win the race.The importance of such integrations were realised by companies who concentrated on their ROI few years back and I would suggest them even in our present financial crisis term. 

Enterprise Content Management – Livelink Vs SharePoint

Do you feel that the growth of an organization is directly proportional to the content mangement within the organization ? or vice versa? Let’s look into one of the driving force behind a companies growth – It’s the Enterprise Content Management. ’Collaboration’, ‘Goals’, ‘Processes’, Business Data Analysis are the words frequently uttered across; when a company revisits its own growth.

The ECM suites provides a better way to organize, reuse and share data across the organization. To name a few, Livelink ECM Suite and Microsoft SharePoint provides an interactive space for document management, version management, auditing, business workflows, business intelligence and many other interesting search features with a user friendly – ‘web site’ style application.And also Microsoft’s BDC and Web Part technologies plays a vital role in third party integrations.(the details of which can be seen in our future posts)

By now,one can define in simple terms that a place where documents are managed can be termed as Enterprise Content Management Suites.In reality, the ROI’s are too high for organizations that have implemented SharePoint or Livelink. Livelink goes one step further by handling the retention management process for documents and incorporating a seemless workflow approval chain along the organization tree. This enables an organization to setup the time period for which a document can be accessible and then purged. In comparision, Livelink seems to be DoD certified and SharePoint may be in the process of getting one…

Analytics, choosing it

We observe many BI Project Sponsors clearly asking for an Analytics Package implementation to meet business needs; the benefit is that it saves time. By deciding on an analytics package we can get the application up quickly and comes with all typical benefits of a ‘buy’ solution against a ‘build’ solution.

So what are the key parameters that we need to look for in choosing an Analytics Package. The following would be the points to consider in choosing an Analytics Package, in the order of importance.

1.The effort to arrive at the right data model for a BI system is huge and as well quite tedious, so a comprehensive ‘Data Model & Metrics, Calculations’ from the package is very important.

2.The flexibility and the openness in managing Data Model is also very critical, some of tools to manage the data model elements that can be looked for are

• Ability to browse the data elements and its definitions
• Support for customization of the data model without getting back to the database syntax
• Auto Source System profiling and field mapping from the source systems to the data model
• Enabling validation of data type, data length of the data model against the source system field definitions
• Means to ensure that customization of the data model in terms of field addition doesn’t happen when a similar element exists
• Availability of standard code data as applicable to the functional area
• Supporting country specific needs in terms of data representation

3. ETL process for a BI system is also a major effort. Though the absolute effort of pulling the data and making it available for the package in the required format cannot be avoided, availability of plug-ins that can understand the data structure from typical systems like ERP would save good amount of effort.

4. Availability of ETL process for typical data validation as part of ETL is also a must; integration with any data quality product would be valuable

5. Ability to support audit and compliance requirements for data usage and reporting

6. Integration of the package with industry specific research data from vendors like D&B, IMS etc to enable benchmarking the performance metrics against industry peers/competitors

7. Customizable Security Framework

8. Semantic layer definition with formulas, hierarchies etc

9. Ready to use Score Cards and dashboard layouts

10. Pre built reports and portal

Often all the pre delivered reports under go changes and are almost completely customized when implemented. So availability of a larger list of reports itself doesn’t mean a lot since most of the reports would be minor variations from one other. Certain compliance reports would be useful when it comes along with the package; these would be published industry standard report formats.

Definitely an evaluation phase to test the Analytics products capability on a sample of the data before choosing it is a must, the above ten points would the evaluation criteria during this exercise.