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).

My previous post was about the integration between Siebel and BI Publisher that was available since Siebel 8.1. As I mentioned back then, the integration is promising, but presented  some serious limitations to BI as a report generation tool for Siebel, and I promised to touch this issue again in a new post. Well, here we go.

With the patch to Siebel 8.1.1.1, some of the isssues have been resolved, while some serious new ones have been created. Our main reason to upgrade (Siebel to 8.1.1.1 and BI Publisher to  10.1.3.4.1) were issues with Active Directory. The Siebel Security Model provided by BI was not documented nor functioning properly in the earlier version. This has been resolved in the new version. The Siebel Security Model basically works like this: a user requests a report, BI then checks in Siebel whether the user has the right responsibility (yes, you need to add the XMLP_DEVELOPER responsibility to each user that needs to create reports) and then BI creates the report and sends it back to Siebel. Works a like charm!

The second in the ‘ultimate collection’ series is full of Siebel (re)sources.

Note, that you might need an Metalink/Oracle Support account for some links!

Links by Oracle self:

• The Complete CRM Blog: THE place to find out what’s new and what’s happening with the Oracle CRM product line.
• Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications: General Siebel index page
• Siebel Business Applications Documentation

As of version 8.1, Oracle BI Publisher (formerly known as XMLP Publisher) has replaced Actuate as report generating tool for Siebel. During a Siebel Case Management implementation, I got some insights which I’d like to share.

The first step was a rather smooth installation and configuration process. We had BI Publisher up and running within no-time, and only very minimal configuration was required to integrate it with Siebel. By pointing the web services to the right URL’s and adjusting some BI settings, we could start making the first reports.

Siebel ships with a large number of out-of-the-box reports, and it’s easy to create your own. The reports combine RTF-templates from the BI Server with XML data from Siebel into various document types, such as PDF. The templates are easy to maintain using BI Publisher Desktop, a simple plugin for MS Word. XML data is composed by Siebel Integration Objects.

Better late than never is a famous saying and was one of the first things that came up in my mind when I first saw the Oracle Siebel CRM Desktop (released in Fix Pack for Siebel CRM). My actual first thought was: Nice! This looks great! and was immediatly followed by: “this is something we have been waiting for for years!”. I am aware of the fact that this might sound a little bit to enthousiastic. Fact is that I really mean it. And yes; Siebel CRM Desktop still has to prove itself in production. The start, however, is promising.