Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Using UCM as content management system for Siebel

Abbreviations can be confusing: UCM can stand for Universal Customer Master or for Universal Content Management. I am discussing the latter.

The Siebel file system is the place for saving documents in Siebel. However, for more demanding customers, Oracle provides a very easy to implement adapter that allows you to use Oracle Universal Content Management as your file system in Siebel. Recently I implemented this solution as part of a Proof of Concept. In this post I’ll share my experiences with you.

The integration between the two is realised using iframes. You basically replace all attachment applets by iframes, that show the relevant files in UCM. The content of the iframe is created by UCM in plain HTML. Using stylesheets provided by Oracle, the iframe looks just like a real Siebel applet, so the user won’t notice much difference. You can use UCM for storing attachments related to most Siebel Business Components like Account, Contact, Activity, Case and so on. From the applets (or: iframes), the user can open documents, add new documents, view and edit metadata and search in the list of files.

Now comes the great part: you can have it all up in running in a few hours! As described in the documentation on the adapter, you start by enabling a few components in UCM and setting the configuration variables. In my case, this was done by an UCM expert, so I could start straight with the Siebel part. This starts with locking a number of projects and importing SIF-files. These files change all the traditional attachment applets (Siebel File System) to Managed Attachment applets (UCM iframes).

Taken from the Oracle UCM Adapter documentation

After the import, compile all the locked projects and turn to the Symbolic URL administration in Siebel. From there, you configure the connection to UCM. All the right settings are mentioned in the documentation, the only thing you need to change yourself is the location of UCM (i.e., the URL). Set up the height of the applet to the desired size, restart your server and you’re done! All attachment applets now show the relevant files in UCM, and newly uploaded files will be stored in UCM.

Although being very easy to install, I feel the current solution still lacks some functionality. Although the user interface is similar to Siebel, it feels like Standard Interactivity mode, lacking easy quering, editing and adding records functionality. All this occurs through a popup. Also, attaching an existing document to another Siebel record (such as a case, contact or account) requires filling in the Row ID, which is normally not something users are familiar with. There’s still quite some room for improvement, but it’s a nice way to quickly set up a content management system.

For a Public sector project, we’ve also set up a UCM Siebel adapter that uses UCM as a Virtual Business Component in Siebel. Although more complex to set up, this overcomes the disadvantages mentioned above and shows the documents in a real Siebel applet. I’ll write a blogpost about that soon!

 

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Category: CRM
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8 Responses (last comment shown first)

February 6, 2012
qwert
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Hi,
Could you please publish the detailed configuration for ” UCM Siebel adapter that uses UCM as a Virtual Business Component” ??

Thanks,qwert

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December 15, 2011
santanu
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Hi,

How can i monitor the integration between UCM and Siebel from UCM side. If any one knows then tell me the information.

Regards,
Santanu

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December 15, 2011
santanu
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Hi,
How can I monitor the integration between Siebel and UCM from UCM side. If anyone knows then please tell me.

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September 8, 2011
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Would be interested to hear how you got on with the VBC connection to UCM…looking forward to that other post (or have I missed it). Cheers!

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August 3, 2011
Rick
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Hi Noor,

Can you tell me what happens when you enter the UCM URL in your browser?

Have you correctly set up Siebel to use this URL?

Regards,
Rick

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August 1, 2011
Noor Khairul
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Hi Rick,
I’ve tried to do the integration between Siebel Public Sector 8.1 with Oracle Universal Content Management 10gR3. For the integration, I use an Siebel-UCM adapter that I downloaded from Oracle .But result is the Manage Attachment UCM does not appear in Siebel, so I can not check in new documents or detach the document. It only show the query results.Could you help me to solve this problem? thanks.

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June 22, 2011
Rick
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Hi John,

I think there are a couple of advantages of using UCM compared to the native Siebel File System. It’s really easy to add additional fields for metadata to UCM and to make these available in the Siebel GUI too. This is much harder in the Siebel File System.

Secondly, as UCM is a product focused on document management, it has extra features such as archiving and automatically deleting files after a certain periods.

Lastly, I have no experience with this, but I believe it will be easier to integrate UCM with oan other applications, so you can use it as a generic document management system across your applications. This would be impossible with the Siebel File System.

Regards,
Rick

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June 20, 2011
john leblanc
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My question is what specifically can you do with UCM and Siebel that managing attachments natively with Siebel alone cannot do? For example can you add metadat valuse to attachments docs without UCM? Can you iniatiate workflows with property updates?

Thanks in advance

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