Poll Result and Analysis

Results of the Poll Future of Siebel are out officially. @lex has collated and presented the analysis at this link. You can also catch up with the official press release here. The results have not taken many by storm but yet gave oxygen to the faith that there is no reason to panic and give up on Siebel. In the ever changing market dynamics, Siebel will continue to emerge with its architecture evolving and adapting to market needs.

With "Open UI" striking and more customers embracing it, its time to explore some Java skills. It also marks centuries of post on CRM Conundrum. Thanks to all readers/followers for making it success. Sooner or Later even you will be reading on piece of Open UI here till then stay tuned.

Happy Voting!!

UIF Calendar Control in MVG Applet

Recently while working on multilingual application we faced strange issue. While setting values in MVG applet with calendar control, any date value was getting appended with UIF_ string. As a result invalid format error was coming. Eagle-eye pursuit resulted in the fact that even on the calendar control the month was like "UIF_May". To our surprise this issue was not happening on all machines. It was occurring only in some of the user machines with specific configuration. On discussion with Oracle it is found to be product defect.
                                                           

With configuration of Windows 7 and IE 8, it happens in ARA/ENU/FRA implementations. In order to resolve the issue IE 8 must be updated to latest patches from Microsoft or as an alternate solution could be:

1. In the Internet Explorer browser, go to Tools > Compatibility view setting > Uncheck all the options.
2. Press F12 and set the Browser Mode value to IE8.

This will resolve the issue for while.  

Happy Crunching!!

Poll Closure

The poll for seeking your opinion regarding future of Siebel has been closed.  Gratitude to everyone who cast their votes and participated in discussions. 

Please stay tuned for a detailed analysis of the poll results on Siebel-Essentials. Many thanks again for voting to all Followers/Members/Readers/Friends. 


Happy Voting!!

The Future of Siebel CRM: Community Poll

"Even after 20 years...It's still magic even if you know how it's done..."

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of Siebel Systems. After being acquired by Oracle in 2005, Siebel CRM and the successor of Siebel Analytics, Oracle Business Intelligence, are still flagship products. Thousands of IT professionals worldwide make a living from these two systems.

Siebel CRM itself has been on the market for 17 years, and in the Siebel community there is much excitement about Oracle's commitment to strengthen the product's position, for example by delivering the

Open UI framework. At the same time, many people wonder how many years Siebel has left. Always with our fingers on the pulse of the Siebel community, we - a group of dedicated Siebel bloggers* are working together to conduct a poll to find out public opinion on that question.

If you want to cast your vote on the poll, you can do it right here. Alternatively you can use this link to access the poll in a separate window or on a mobile device.





Thanks for your vote.

Happy Voting!!
PS: Special thanks to Alex for orchestrating this wonderful piece and celebrate in style.

*The following blogs are hosting this poll:

Impossible Siebel
On Demand Education
Siebel Essentials
Siebel Observer 
Siebel Tech Blog
Siebel Unleashed 
Wentari 


Did we miss your blog from this list? Do you want to participate? Then please contact Alex via twitter or Google+.

RecipientBusComp

A lot has been written on CreateRequest Method for Outbound Communication Manager Business Service. Recently we faced strange issue where users were bombarded with multiple emails for single request. On searching the issue on web i discovered lot of instances where this issue has occurred but solution was not clearly provided. This issue occurs mainly because Recipient Groups are not properly set up or the relationship between Primary BC and Recipient BC is not correctly defined.In this post i will try to take a dig at some of the important parameters which can help you define recipient buscomp.

Consider a scenario where you have a Service Request and multiple contacts associated to it with multiple roles. Now on status change mail should trigger to all contacts associated to Service Request and in some cases only to contacts with specific roles.

One can achieve the same without creating custom Recipient Groups with help of Recipient BusComp and Recipient Search Spec parameter.If one has good understanding of recipient groups i will still recommend go with that approach. However to use "TestAddress" parameter is not a good idea here because it overrides recipient's email address and will send multiple emails to the email defined in TestAddress. If you are using TestAddress with Recepient BusComp parameter, then ensure that only one record is returned in Recipient Buscomp. If there are multiple candidates in the Recepient Buscomp, multiple emails will be sent to TestAddress. Using TestAddress will ignore the value returned by Recipient Email Address Field user property in Recipient Buscomp.

In order to implement the above scenario, you have to consider following parameters of CreateRequest Method.

1 - CommProfileOverride
This is the name of profile used for communication

2 - PackageNameList
This is the name of template which is used for field substitution

3 - SourceIdList
Semicolon-delimited list of IDs. These Ids are used for record substitution for the BC defined in the Template.

4 - SourceBusObj
Name of the business object. This is very important in order to determine the link between primary Bc and Recipient BC. Service Request in this Case.

5- RecipientBusComp
Name of the Business component which contains recipient records. In this case it has to be business component based on the inter table between Servcie Request and contact. Email will be sent to associated contacts to the value returned by Recipient Email Address user property in recipient business component. In this case it is Service Request Contact BC.

6 - RecipSearchSpec
This parameter can you used to filter recipients. We can filter record based on the role to send email to specific person.

7- TestAddress
If Recipient Email Address Field user property is not defined and email needs to be sent to particular email id. However make sure Recipient BC always returns one record.
Using these parameters one can control email flow dynamically. Any comments and suggestion on usage of this method is useful.

Happy Mailing!!

[FieldName.TransCode]

While the whole world running for Open UI but I am still flagging my own old issues.Recently during performance improvement drive from my inner soul,  i read an interesting property while querying on Multilingual fields. If you know about TransCode function this post in not for you.

In Multilingual environment, with loads of records, querying on Multilingual field can be really taxing as these searches require a join to the S_LST_OF_VAL table in the resulting SQL code. To increase the performance one can append "TransCode" function with field name to retrieve the (untranslated) language-independent code (LIC) from a column in the base table, rather than returning the display value.
Syntax:
[Status.TransCode] = 'closed'

This function can be used in
1 - In Calculated Fields.
2 - In script. for ex. in GetFieldValue("Status.TransCode") statement
3 - In Workflows.
4 - In Link/Picklist searchspec.
5 - In DVM validation expression.

I am sure most of guys in siebel development will be aware of this thing but if you are not aware of this Transcode it can be helpful in future implementations.


Happy Crunching!!

Happy New Year!!

New Year's Day is every man's birthday. 

Cheers to New Year with another chance to get it right.  With Sun settling in and 2k12 memories getting recycled i wish you and your loved ones a very happy and prosperous new year. May you get less bugs and more incentives. I am going for a new assignment and hope it will be on Open UI. 

Resolution or no resolution again wishing you a very bombastic new year.

Happy 2k13!!