Ask the Expert 01

Question :

Hi,

I have been following your site for quite sometime and its great.
Wanted to have a clear idea on the Siebel EMail Response module.

I did go through the bookshelf which gives a very good idea but still wanted to know if there are some practical implementation done.

Requirement is that a service request or an activity needs to be created from an email.

Response :

From what i understand of your requirement, please find the following reply to your query. Once the email is triggered using the Outbound Communication Manager BS, an activity gets generated as per the Siebel vanilla functionality. The activity of Type Email-Inbound or Email-Outbound will get created provided the Email templates, Email server, Outbound Communication Manager component is configured properly.

If one wants to generate customized activity / SR post the email is triggered, then e-scripts or VB scripts have to be used. For e.g The email has to be sent to the customer on updation of customer’s demographic info. The e-script written on appropriate event(s) can be called. This code will further invoke an email Workflow (WF). After the WF has been invoked, another chunk of code/Workflow has to be invoked for generating activity / SR by creating a new record in the custom BC.

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Toggling with the Search Specification in Applet

Working with Siebel, I have come across many challenging requirements. Keeping in mind the Siebel Best Practices, the challenge gets tougher. In this post, I will share such a requirement. 

The requirement was to put search specification in a Toggle Applet. Sounds very practical and easy but trust me it was not. About the toggle applet, Siebel Tools Help says:If two applets are defined with the same business component and both have a search specification, then the search specification for the applet in lowest sector is used.

Do not specify different search specifications where several applets in one view are based on the same business component. All of these applets should have the same or an empty search specification.

Going by the above mentioned documentation, I thought of two immediate approaches:

1. Copy the BC and Map one applet which is having the search spec.

I had already made a copy of the BC and creating a third copy, to map to the two given applets, was not an intelligent approach.

2. As per the Siebel Help content we can give the search specification in a form applet.

The Applets we were dealing with were List applets and not Form applets. So the second approach was not applicable either.

Hence the best alternative was to write a script which is as follows:

Set profile attrib in two applets when the user is going to toggle or executed query or SortAscending or SortDescending.

APPLET 1:

if (MethodName == “ExecuteQuery” ||  MethodName == “SortAscending” ||  MethodName == “SortDescending”)

{

TheApplication ().SetProfileAttr (“UserDoingQuery”, “Y”);

}

if (MethodName == “ToggleTo”)

{

TheApplication().SetProfileAttr(“Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin”, “2″);

}

APPLET 2:

Use the same code as above and,

Set Profile Attribute as “Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin” = 1.

In Event method of Business Component (BusComp_PreQuery   event)

Get the profile Attrib and give the search spec as per your requirement and clear the profile Attribute.

if ((TheApplication().GetProfileAttr(“Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin”) == “2″) || (TheApplication().SetProfileAttr(“UserDoingQuery”) == “Y”))

{

this.SetSearchSpec (“Name”, “XYZ”);

TheApplication().SetProfileAttr (“Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin”,”");

}

if ((TheApplication().GetProfileAttr(“Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin”) == “2″) || (TheApplication().SetProfileAttr(“UserDoingQuery”) == “Y”))

{

this.SetSearchSpec (“Name”, “ABC”);

TheApplication ().SetProfileAttr (“Uni Tgt Team ToggledBackToAdmin”,”");

}

This script helped in enabling the search specification in a toggle applet. Hence, another challenging requirement was successfully met.

To know more about Toggle Applet

Auditing Best Practices on a button Click – EScript doc

Prevention is better than precaution” An audit (ES Review) was conducted for the previous project and the report stated that most of the Siebel best practices were not implemented which led to poor performance of the application. Sometimes we used to perform the hectic job of copying each and every script manually to a word document for script documentation.

After the project was over, a thought came into my mind, why not to prepare a tool that would scan the script, check for the Siebel best practices implementations and would generate a word document regarding the same, in addition to this if this tool would also copy the script into word document then it would be like a “red cherry on the cake.” So I prepared a tool named escript doc aud

• eScript Auditor is an audit tool developed in VB .Net 2005 which checks whether the script has followed Siebel Best practices and documents the entire code in a word document

Features:

The major feature of the escript doc aud is that it documents and audits every script written at the following level:

• Application

• Business Service

• Business Component

• Applet

Working:

Search for the required object script for which you need to mention the object name in search textbox shown above with selecting appropriate script type and click “Go” button
Respectively a script will be displayed under script area also with all the non followed best practices (highlighted in red shown in above picture)
If required hit “Create Script Area Doc” button to generate a word document for that particular script along with its non followed best practices.
Advantages:

• Can copy thousands of lines of code (LOC) in couple of minutes.

• Reduces the manual effort required.

• In fraction of second audits the entire script.

Script Doc Aud gives the customer friendly GUI to see each script and perform best practice violation check up.
To know more about EScript doc

Siebel Business Solution Tool – Adding value for our customers

As a Siebel Consulting firm, our sales team hunts for prospective clients. Once the client is acquired, cost estimation and resource allocation are vital processes before kick starting the project. After lots of hard work and hurdles (difficulties / issues) the development team comes up with the product.

Do the developers ponder on the modules they developed and its viability for client ? Do they go back and see how end users are using it? What value the Client is deriving, out of the application/product’s usage?

One day the above unanswered questions resurfaced on my head. By gathering some techno-functional expertise, I attempted to answer the above questions. I shared these views with my seniors, and eventually got the nod to work on Development of a Business Solution Tool. Some of the salient features of this Business solution tool are as follows:

• Automated Siebel CRM Tool that captures the usage details of the application.
• It keeps track of every user’s login details to the application and the number of views that are traversed by the user.

The above requirement was a challenge and I was looking forward to develop something which would give add-on value for our Clients.

Few of these challenges were:

• Calculating cost effectiveness – capturing the time spent by the end user on a particular view of the application.
• Keeping Track of time spent by each user in the application.
• Statistics w.r.t the heavy and sparing use of the views in the application.

After overcoming the obstacles faced, the development of the Business Tool was done in 2 weeks time. After testing, re-tesing and ensuring the product was bug-free, the Tool was served on the platter of our client. Couple of features of the Tool was cited as below followed by the screenshot:

• Keeps track of Login details of the users. “Login name” and “Application In-Out time.
• Keeps track of Time spent by each user in a particular view. “View In-Out time”.

This Tool will be helpful for the Client to find out the usage of application by their customers. Sometimes navigation becomes difficult to understand for the end users in Siebel. For e.g. The user is unable to some views due to the lack of knowledge of navigation. This tool fulfills that requirement too.

After the development of an Application, the most important benefit our Client derive out of this tool is as follows:

• Calculate Cost Effectiveness of Siebel System with respect to Time and Efficiency.

Solutions / questions / comments are welcome.

Thanks for reading this blog. To know more about Siebel Business Solution Tool

AUTO SAD-Siebel Administration Automation Tool

Auto Sad is a production support tool that automates and provides a faster mechanism to perform Siebel Administrative Tasks on clicks of some buttons on multiple servers.

Siebel Architecture involves the following Servers

• Siebel Server

• Siebel Gateway Name Server

• Siebel Web Server

These servers may or may not be on the same machine.

As a system administrator, one often has to do repetitive tasks such as

• Bouncing of Services(Starting or stopping services)

• Migrating SRF from one location to another

• Compilation of Siebel Repository File(SRF)

• Generate Browser Scripts.

To perform these tasks the Siebel Administrator needs to login into each server remotely and then execute them. If there are only a handful of servers, this task may not be very intimidating, but there are many times when there are many servers installed on separate machines. This is where Auto Sad comes into the picture which automates the whole process. Using Auto Sad, a Siebel Administrator can perform all the basic tasks by entering required values in their profile and then by click on buttons those tasks can be performed.

AUTO SAD tool involves various steps such as:

1. Login through sadmin credentials
2. Create/Edit Environment Profile
3. Generate batch Files for individual tasks
4. Execute Batch Files for the required tasks
5. Launch Siebel Thin Client

From the above screenshot, it is clear that the various administrative tasks can be performed easily by simply click of buttons thereby facilitating the Siebel administrator to work efficiently.Any organization implementing Siebel can make use of this tool to achieve faster and convenient way to perform Siebel Administrative Tasks thereby saving 30% of the time for deployment process.

Read More about AUTO SAD

Computer and Telephone going hand in hand

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) as the name suggests, is a technology that allows the interactions between a computer and a telephone to be integrated or synchronized.

CTI systems can take several types of inputs including a voice input from Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR) or email, fax and web etc.

Where is CTI used?
Depending on the business type and real time interactivity, we need to decide whether we can go with this approach.
For e.g. In an Online, Help/Solution providing firm, Tele-marketing centers or a Call Center the telephone usage would be high. This means if the business is telephone intensive then we might use this approach so that it would be easy to trace the calls and the caller information.

How to implement CTI in Siebel?
Depending on the business requirements either of the following approaches can be used to implement CTI setup for Siebel Call Center Application
It’s a faster approach as compared to the second one. It uses the vendor specific library which has the configuration parameters required for the setup.
This includes the development of certain customized web services and usage of the ASI s.

Example: Scenario where IVR triggers CTI
In our scenario, various methods of customized Business service for IVR trigger the middleware and the middleware further invokes the CTI module.
These methods need to be exposed as web services to publish them on the web at the host address. This host address is specified by the path which is same as the one where we need to get the CTI toolbar and CTI services enabled.
In all, the Business service methods act as the traversing points through which the CSR can navigate to the specified view, taking the output arguments from the function as the input CED (Caller Entered Digit) data for the CTI system.
CTI Applications:

What CTI can do and why is it preferred?

• Displays the complete call information

• Authenticates the caller

• Agent state information can also be displayed

• Can receive fax messages and route it to respective recipients

Greater efficiency
Dialing out automatically with a single mouse click from a computer saves time and is more accurate.
Staff can handle more calls in a given period of time.

Logging calls, allows monitoring the effectiveness of :

• Operating procedures

• Individual staff members.

• Improved Customer Service

• Receiving customer details on screen at the same moment you receive the incoming call.

• Automatically seeing key details about that customer.

• Automatic call distribution (ACD) automatically answers calls with a voice menu, and uses caller responses to route incoming calls.

Challenges in setting up a CTI Systems:

If IVR is used for triggering purposes, then the Web service response time can be a hurdle in case of screen pops configured in the CTI system.

There could be some cases, where the vanilla views can’t be used for displaying the complete info, so lot more customizations are to be done.

Navigating between various screens could be time consuming.Screen transfer between agents could be difficult to implement.As the implementation (Middleware used) is Vendor dependent, the functionalities and services provided also differ. Hence, there is a difficulty in choosing among the various vendors.

As the CTI services are server dependent, there is always a difficulty in maintaining those IC servers
Network congestion could also hamper the CTI response time.

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Sales Cycle & Siebel Sales Application

Introduction to Sales Cycle
Sales Cycle plays a critical role in Customer Relationship Management. It is critical in a way because it is the initial point of contact for any customer. For any CRM application it is important to understand the Sales Cycle. The Sales Cycle starts from Prospecting and ends when a deal is closed and the revenue is realized.
There are various steps involved in an end-to-end Sales Cycle.

1. Prospecting:It involves creating the target database.
2. Lead Generation: A lead is an expressed interest shown by the prospects. It is used by a sales agent to determine whether there is a potential for some sales opportunity.
3. Opportunity Creation: nce a lead is qualified, an opportunity is created.
4. Quote Generation: Sales agent prepare quotes to communicate prices, discounts and special offers that are associated with a product/service which is part of a sale.
5. Order Creation:Once the quote is accepted it is converted into an order.
6. Closure:The deal is closed once the order is created.

The Sales Cycle may differ to some extent depending upon the type of business. But a typical sales cycle would follow the above mentioned steps.
Mapping the Sales Cycle with SIEBEL Sales Application
Following are the important business entities involved in Siebel Sales Application:

1. Accounts
2. Contacts
3. Opportunities
4. Quotes

The lead that is generated through various sources is captured in Accounts screen. It captures the details like – Account Name, Address, Status of the Account (i.e. whether the Account is active/inactive, Qualified, contract pending etc), Account Type (i.e. whether the Account holder is an existing customer, Business, Competitor or Vendor etc.) within the Account Screen.
The Accounts Screen is then linked to Opportunities, Contacts and Quotes.
The Opportunities Screen will have the details such as opportunity name, account name to which it is associated, revenue that could be generated from the opportunity, sales stage (prospecting, qualification, closing, lost), name of sales team, lead quality(excellent, very high, high, fair, poor) etc.
The Contacts Screen will have details such as name of the person, phone number, job title, name of the account, address etc. The Quotes Screen will have details related to the quotes that have been generated for a particular order.
The quotes may undergo some iteration if there is any negotiation between the two parties. A Quote Screen will typically have the Quote name & number, Revision, date of creation, name of the account to which it is associated, name of sales rep, Status (whether the quote is approved, accepted, in-progress, active etc.)

Advantages of Siebel Sales Application
Following are the advantages of Siebel Sales Application:

1. Siebel Sales simplifies and optimizes the task of planning and managing the sales process by providing complete visibility into the sales cycle, helping companies to plan and manage effective selling activities.
2. By bringing business activity information closer to the user, displayed in one place, sales people can find what they need to work on and then quickly navigate to that object within the application.
3. Each organization may use slightly or sometimes greatly different terminology. Often applications will use industry standard terminology that is not necessarily applicable to a particular organization. Customization allows each customer to use their own chosen terminology. This way it cuts down on time that is required to train users on what each field is for and thus allowing for a more seamless transition to a new application.

Read More about Siebel Sales Application

Ask the Expert

Do you have a question on Siebel Upgrades, Implementation or just about the best Siebel business practices in general? No hassles! Submit your question in the comments section below.

Experts from our Siebel practice will answers your questions twice a week and the answers will be published in the Ask the Expert Section

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Look before you leap – Is an assessment necessary before a Siebel upgrade ?

In today’s project execution scenario, upgrade assessments have gained much more importance than ever before.

Yet, IT managers face a lot of push back from their customer when they are faced with the cost associated with executing an upgrade assessment

The client wonders, why can’t we directly start with upgrade and move to a newer version. Why spend on an upgrade assessment?

Listed below are some of the arguments in favor of doing an assessment before going in for an upgrade. This applies equally to any package and not only Siebel.

1. Why we require Assessment?

If you do an upgrade assessment with a sample area of the functionality, you will be in a position

• To measure the precise scope of the upgrade exercise: What has to be done, when and how long it will take.

• To get a feel for the technical complexity of the upgrade – The vendor may tout the upgrade as a one click exercise that will be completed in half an hour while the users are out to lunch. The reality may be different.

• To judge which of the new “features” are absolutely essential to get your users back on the road with minimum fuss and low cost

• To assess the technical complexity of the upgrade – How much of your application will still work after the upgrade? Trust me, a lot of things will break.

• To assess the gaps & issues highlighted by a focus group of users – You could let key users preview the result of upgrade exercise and see what they think about it.

• To estimate the time and effort required to do the actual upgrade

• To decide on a GO/NO-GO: The assessment will give you enough information to decide whether the upgrade is a good idea or not after all. It’s a good idea to get the assessment done by an independent party without bias to the software supplier

2. Continuing benefits of Assessment during the upgrade

Once a GO decision has been made, the upgrade assessment will continue to give you returns when executing the actual upgrade in the form of the below artifacts

• Knowledge repository: You will have a good understanding of the pitfalls faced by the assessment team.

• A realistic and re-usable Project Plan : Planning and precursor activities completed during POC will reduce actual upgrade timeline

• Knowledge of Pre-requisites : Identification of upgrade tasks specific to Application/infrastructure

• Compressed critical path: You will know which activities take a long time and fine tune upgrade processes to squeeze the timeline.

• Resource readiness : You will know exactly what kind of resources are required to execute the upgrade and be ready to start upgrade on short notice

In conclusion, an assessment gives client an accurate method of determining if an upgrade is the right route to take, and gives precise estimation of the scope, schedule, resources and cost associated, which in turn lead to speedy decision making.

Inputs from Jagdish

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Siebel moves to the SOA world

Siebel Web Services (SOA enabled) provide platform independent integration and rely on Internet development standards and protocols (XML, SOAP, WSDL etc) for communication. There are two type of Siebel Web Service known as Inbound Web Service and Outbound Web Service and Siebel provides host of pre-built ASI (Application Service Interface) which can be used for two way integration between external and Siebel Applications. Inbound Web Services are used to expose existing Siebel Business Service and Workflows to Web Service which will be consumed by external system. Outbound Web Service relies on a WSDL file provided by the external system to define the external service definitions to enable Siebel to invoke the Web Service.

An existing Siebel business service or workflow process can be exposed as an Inbound Web Service to be consumed by an external application. Siebel Outbound Web Services framework can also consume a Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) file provided by an external application and have the Siebel application invoke that Web Service. The diagram below depicts Siebel-External system integration using Siebel EAI/Web Service.

The OracleAS Adapter for Siebel uses the same Siebel Web Services Framework (introduced in Siebel 7.5).

Options
• ORACLE offered pre-built (release independent) ASI to functions such as Account and Opportunity
• Custom built ASI (release dependent) from the Siebel exposed business services
• ORACLE AS adapter
• Exposing Pl/SQL stored procedures as Web Services
• The iWay Adapter for to integrate Siebel application system with any other legacy system, DBMS, ERP, SCM, or CRM application on any platform
• Oracle Fusion middleware which support SOA and BPM for platform independent integration.

Methods
• ASI Exposes Siebel business services and workflow processes as Web Services which can be consumed by external system for further processing.
• Inbound ASI: The Siebel application allows enterprises to publish any Siebel business service or business process as a Web Service. This process is also known as creating an Inbound Web Service for external application invoking Siebel exposed ASI as a web service (ORACLE financials synching ORACLE Order status to Seibel Sales Order).
• Outbound ASI: Siebel apps invoking external web service. (Siebel sales order applet invoking ORACLE ERP to query quantity available.)

System Requirements for ASIs
• Siebel server environment, with the Siebel Web Server Extension (SWSE) set up.
• Application server
• Siebel Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) component group must be enabled.
• Access to the Web Services Administration view for this application, like using Siebel Client.

Inbound Web Service Strategy: The published Siebel Web Service will be consumed by External. The above diagram illustrates steps involved:
• The WSDL document for the active Siebel Web Service will be published as Inbound Web Service.
• WDSL will be generated for Siebel business service/Workflow and will be published on net. The published WSDL will be consumed by external system for further processing.
• The external system will send SOAP request to Siebel Application.
• The Siebel Inbound Web Service dispatcher will convert SOAP request into property sets and pass it to Siebel Business Service or Workflow for further processing.
• The property sets will be returned from business service or business process to the Siebel Web Service inbound dispatcher.
• The response will be converted into SOAP message and sent to the external system Web Service as a response.

Siebel Outbound web service integration strategy: External systems can publish Web Services/SOA WSDL file which will be consumed by Siebel. The above diagram illustrates steps involved:
• The WSDL document for the active Web Service will be published as outbound Web Service.
• The generated WDSL from outer system will be consumed by Siebel Outbound Web Services for further processing. Siebel Tools will be used to mapping and processing of external request.
• The Siebel will send SOAP request to external system.
• The Siebel Outbound Web Service dispatcher will convert SOAP response into XML and pass it to external system for further processing.
• The property sets will be returned from business service or business process to the Siebel Web Service outbound dispatcher.
• The response/request will be converted into SOAP message and sent to the foreign system Web Service as a response/request.

OracleAS: The OracleAS Adapter for Siebel supports the following integration access methods:
• Siebel Java Data Bean for services involving Siebel Business Components or Siebel Business Services. • Siebel COM Data Interface for services involving Siebel Business Components or Siebel Business Services.
• Siebel XML for events and services involving Siebel Integration Objects.

Actuate iServer exposes its functions as Web Services; which can be accessed by Actuate Web Services API or through WSDL published by Actuate.
PL / SQL Stored Procedures – to be exposed as web services.

Service Enabling Reference Architecture tools
• Workflow and business services are exposed as web services.
• Web service dispatcher handles inbound web service calls from consumers.
• Web services outbound proxy handles invocation of external web services to be consumed by Siebel.

Siebel 7.5.3
• SOA support
• SOAP 1.1
• WSDL 1.1
• XSD support
• ASI (application service interface) introduced.

Siebel 7.7
• SOA support
• SOAP 1.1
• WSDL 1.1
• XSD support
• WS-I
• Workflow and Business service based ASI
• WS-security

Siebel 7.8.2
• SOA support
• SOAP 1.1
• WSDL 1.1
• XSD support
• Interoperability validation
• Access control

Siebel 8.0
• WS-I attachment
• Customer order management exposed as web service
• SOA support
• SOAP 1.1
• WSDL 1.1
• XSD support
• Enhanced ASI (application service interface)
• Fusion Middleware (SOA and BPEL Support)

Inputs from Sanjeev Patel

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Single Sign-On in Siebel

Being a software developer in Siebel, I had numerous opportunities to create something using this tool. Apart from acknowledging client requests which is everyone’s number one priority, like any other developer I also wanted to first get my fundamentals strong in this tool. There were times when I tried 2-3 different ways to deal with one of the old demands and was successful in discovering many new and simpler methods. Since then I always experiment to meet the requirements and never hesitated to play with Siebel.

This led me into using these concepts readily and implementing them in real time. While using Siebel for many servers in my project, the traditional practice to Sign-In every time you open a new Siebel application server was not only exasperating at times but also a shortcoming in terms of Siebel’s user friendly behavior. Searching an answer for this problem I came across the Single Sign-On Process.

For starters, what is Single Sign-In (SSO)?

It is a session/user authentication process that allows a user to enter name and password for only a single time in entire session in order to access multiple applications. The process authenticates the user for all the applications they have been given rights to and eliminates further prompts when they switch applications during a particular session.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is becoming the standard for advanced security in IT sector. This equips us in streamlined, consistent and secure password management policy for every user. Cutting down on the number of passwords issued to users and reducing time spent on administration, support and training, SSO directly impacts the daily user ability.

The following steps need to be followed for configuring Web Single Sign On and the Active Directory Security Adapter.

1. An ADSI service account will be needed.This service account is one used to bind to the Active Directory and will also hold the shared database credentials.
2. The service account will also be the web anonymous user for Single Sign On and must have a Siebel login with Web Anonymous User responsibility. This anonymous user does not need a database account.
3. Create the shared database account. All users will connect to the database with this database account instead of an individual database account.
4. Create a custom application object manager that will be configured for ADSI security adapter authentication instead of database authentication.
5. Add the SSO Sales Object Manager to the Siebel Web Server Extension Update the Siebel Web Server Extension eapps.cfg file to include the SSO Sales Object Manager.
6. Add a new virtual directory to IIS for SSO.
7. Configure Siebel Web Server for Web SSO. Open the eapps.cfg file and set parameter IntegratedDomainAuth = True in [swe] section and add following parameter in [SSO] section.

- SingleSignOn=TRUE
- TrustToken=token name
- userspecsource=server
- userspec=REMOTE_USER
- StartCommand= SWECmd=GotoView&SWEView=Sales+Home+Page+View&SWERF=1

This will enable the Single Sign On and it will be authenticated by Windows Integrated Authentication.

Configure ADSI Security Adapter Named Subsystem in Server Administration – Configuration; Enterprises; profile configuration tab and set the parameters for ADSI.

If the authentication is stolen then all resources becomes vulnerable. In addition, you need to be aware of whether there are backups to the SSO in the event the system is down; if the Server is down then the network resources will remain unavailable.

Post by Suman Kumar

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