Winter is COMING!!!  The new Salesforce release is packed with amazing features. If you're a Salesforce enthusiast or already part of this vast ecosystem, grab a cup of coffee and read the blog to stay updated.

The upcoming Salesforce Winter '25 release introduces major enhancements across its products. We’ll highlight some of the most exciting updates in the Admin Preview, with a particular emphasis on Agentforce. Our expertise in Generative AI enables us to deliver solutions that not only save our clients time but also drive revenue growth. Many of our clients currently utilize these products and are eager about the new improvements, which are set to enhance efficiency, personalization, and automation in their business processes.

The upcoming Salesforce Winter '25 release will introduce many important improvements to their products. Specifically, we are focusing on Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and Service Cloud as many of our clients use these products and are excited about the new improvements that are going to enhance efficiency, personalization, and automation in their business processes. If you're wondering what to expect in this winter update, we've gathered key insights on the most valuable updates before the release.

We are continuing to explore the new features and improvements of the Summer '24 release, which includes features aimed at boosting efficiency, simplifying workflows, and providing a more user-friendly experience. Let's look at some of the key highlights in this latest update.

Salesforce has set a new standard with its Summer '24 release, introducing a variety of features designed to enhance efficiency, streamline workflows, and offer a more user-friendly experience. Let's take a closer look at some of the important highlights in this recent update.

Salesforce has once again set a new standard with its Summer '24 release, featuring a range of features aimed at boosting efficiency, simplifying workflows, and providing a more user-friendly experience. Let's explore some of the key highlights in this latest update.

Ideaport Riga had the privilege of participating in the Salesforce World Tour London 2024 as a proud sponsor. This remarkable event was an excellent opportunity to engage with Salesforce users and partners from different industries, backgrounds, and geographies.

In April 2024, Ideaport Riga participated in Oracle Siebel CRM events held in Sweden and Finland. During the event, Ideaport Riga showcased the potential of Magnet AI to transform the CRM landscape. Magnet AI is a free and open-source solution that offers innovative capabilities to revolutionize customer relationship management.

A great User Experience (UX) is often cited as a crucial factor in achieving high user adoption. However, what does it entail precisely, and how can we determine when UX is truly good, and user adoption is high?

In this blog, we are exploring what User Experience (UX) is, how it is related to User Adoption and how companies can increase user productivity with better UX design.

Salesforce, the leading CRM platform, has redefined how businesses manage their operations and customer relationships. While Salesforce offers robust functionality out-of-the-box, the User Experience (UX) plays a vital role in reaching the business objectives behind the implementation.

In this blog, we will delve into the importance of UX design throughout the lifecycle of Salesforce, exploring the best times to plan and implement UX improvements.

To make Salesforce CRM highly effective for business and ensure widespread user adoption, a great user experience (UX) is crucial. The optimal method to accomplish this is through a phased approach to UX design, which has demonstrated itself as the gold standard best practice.

This article will explore the different phases of improving Salesforce UX and discuss the advantages of partnering with external resources for UX design.

Enhancing the user experience (UX) of Salesforce is not only crucial for user satisfaction but also holds significant business value. In this blog post, we will explore the monetary impact of improved UX and highlight the additional benefits that come with it, such as better decision-making, unlocking innovation, and higher return on investment (ROI) in Salesforce.

It is no surprise that Digital service channels are being used a lot more than before the pandemic. Consumers have embraced self-service, chatbots and live chat more in recent years, raising the digital expectation bar. By providing a poor Chatbot experience to your customers, you run the risk of customer churn. Since the rise of ChatGPT, we recommend that organizations invest in the latest generation of chatbots (like Einstein Chatbot) and pay closer attention to chatbot experience design and shift from menu-based to NLP-based or hybrid bots.

Three months ago, Ideaport hosted a four-episode webinar series entitled "Three initiatives to transform your Siebel CRM in 2021." After the introductory overview webinar, we dived each initiative's details, covering such topics as Siebel Cloud Native Architecture, Siebel - Kafka integration and Siebel UX transformation using Ideaport tools and methods. Ready to access the recordings? They are right here. 

Now it's the time for another webinar series, "Hedging your Siebel career", with three episodes.

While working as Siebel Business Analysts, you have mastered a lot of skills. You are adept at talking to business subject experts and formulating functional requirements. You know end-to-end business processes in your company inside out. You learned to work with Siebel developers and write comprehensive user stories for them. Wonder where you can develop next? What about the Scrum Product Owner certification? Ah, you’ve already got it.

When I first heard of DX4C a year ago, I was dismayed: how come Oracle uses the best Siebel engineering team resources to develop some other product rather than building the stuff Siebel CRM customers require? 

After reading this article you will:

#1: have a better understanding of the Streaming approach that can be used to integrate with Salesforce;
#2: see the pros and cons of this approach;

#3: know a little more about Apache Kafka;

#4: see how you can maintain your integration;

#5: see how streaming works in practice;

#6: have more food for thought ;)

Shall we begin?

On June 2, we hosted the first public Nexus Face webinar, with 65 people attending. 

While discussing why Siebel application is often lagging behind its competitors in usability, we came up with three points:

• Missing user-centricity in design
• Limited amount of UI Components
• Lack of UI Design Patterns for complex user flows

In this article, I would like to familiarize Siebel experts with the main terms, tools, and methods used in the User Experience (UX) domain. To make concepts more tangible, I will explain what UX tools we at Idea Port Riga use during the two-week-long mini-project as we discover Siebel UX improvement opportunities.

We are back with the second article on Siebel Open UI usability improvements. In the first article, we set the stage and drafted your first steps in the Siebel UX transformation journey (e.g. making friends with the "digital" team at your company). Now we will continue by sharing different kinds of topics regarding the Nexus Bridge.

For the second year in a row I am leaving San Francisco and Oracle OpenWorld very excited. Last year Oleg and I started to work on the idea, which eventually became the Nexus Bridge for Siebel Open UI. This year I have presented the process for running Siebel UX improvements projects at the Siebel Customers Advisory Board meeting in San Francisco. Nexus Bridge is a crucial technical enabler in Siebel UX projects run by both by Idea Port Riga and several other customers.

This autumn, Idea Port Riga partnered with the Siebelhub team to share our vision about improving Siebel UX with you, the great Siebel community!

While working on this post, we came across the "CRM Technology Value Matrix 2019" by Nucleus Research. Their verdict that "Siebel CRM has the most breadth of capabilities," yet "the product falls behind in usability," perfectly matches our view on Siebel in 2019. 

Siebel UX is not up to date. Siebel Open UI introduction in 2012 made it possible for Siebel customers to change Siebel UI's look & feel by modifying CSS and writing small pieces of jQuery code. By doing so, you can make Siebel look in accordance with the corporate brand book and slightly improve how users feel using the system. Still, these changes do not bring Siebel UX to the level users expect from web applications in 2019 when it comes to visual aesthetics and ease of use. 

This article will guide you through configuring integration between SalesForce and DropBox, how to avoid user interaction to grant access to DropBox and also how to keep SalesForce notified about changes in DropBox.

There are some situations when you think it would be good to take files from DropBox, parse it in SalesForce and make some operations according to parsed data within SalesForce. Even more, it would be good if SalesForce could take required action right after the file has been changed or uploaded to DropBox.

Recently we were executing a memory usage analysis in my current (node.js) project. This article summarizes some of our findings, which may be useful to other projects. It does not describe the very basics of the mark-and-sweep garbage collection algorithm. Instead, it focuses on the details of the particular tools we used.

It’s not something new that Mobile Phones and Mobile Applications comes into our daily life, and they come not only as a tool for communication and entertainment. Many enterprises adopt mobile technologies to give their field workers ability to fulfill operations that previously could be done only in office.

Enterprise mobile applications are recognized as a separate class of mobile application. Microsoft outlines a set of features important to enterprise users and providing tools and practices to fulfill them.

Sometimes there is an urgent need popping up in the middle of an investigation of what is happening with your application server – e.g., a process is showing up, but refuses to serve network connections. There could be thousands of reasons why it is stuck, but one of the most common and a classic problem is deadlocked threads, i.e. threads that didn't share some of the resources on start-up correctly.

Suppose that weeks of developing business processes, building user interface and integrating Siebel with other systems are gone at last; implementation can be considered completed, and users have started to work with Siebel. There are no fatal bugs, nor annoying performance issues. Still, there can be something left to improve, specifically ergonomics of your Siebel implementation – and, possibly, efficiency of users' actions and operations in Siebel.

On one of my recent projects I’ve been asked to describe how our Restful API can be consumed by a third party service. In a SOAP world this task usually boils down to providing a WSDL, which can simplify understanding of exposed API, and can also be used for generating API clients in a most standardized manner.

In my previous article I described some basic tricks that are helpful for working with property sets. Here I am going to describe a few more tricks, which are still simple enough to quickly incorporate those in your daily routine. For doing something more complex, you can consider scripting, just as we did when we decided that workflows with huge number of steps are quite difficult and time consuming to develop and maintain.

When practicing any of the agile software development methodologies – despite an inherent flexibility of those – it is rather important at least to start with a “by the book” approach. This means that when you roll out your agile processes, you try to implement each and every aspect of it, even if that seems useless or not required in your particular situation. Only then you can see from experience that something needs to be tailored – and a retrospective is a powerful tool to facilitate that kind of team learning.

Scrum, being one of the most well-known lightweight agile process frameworks, is used a lot nowadays. But are we using it right? One might argue that an adaptable framework suggests no „wrong” uses – you’d simply tune it so that it suits your needs just perfectly. Although that might be the case in theory, but looking at how real-world Scrum projects cope with different situations, one might come to a conclusion that it isn’t as straightforward as it seems...

On 18-19 of May in the heart of London “Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit” took place. Most probably, you’ve heard about Gartner in relation to their famous Magic Quadrants that emphasize leaders in selected categories. Nevertheless, they do a lot of other interesting stuff including various events organization.

Redis is described by its author Salvatore Sanfilippo as a “strange project”. It’s a distributed cache, it’s an in-memory key-value store, and it’s a notification (publish/subscribe) server. A kind of all-in-one, which is actually good at everything it does. Although Redis keys and values are essentially just strings, one can group them into lists, sets, hashes and all-powerful sorted sets. It also stores numbers very efficiently, which makes such values consume less memory and enables fast numerical operations on them (like atomic increments).

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let’s be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let’s gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way – e.g., quick decision making.

The last few months I’ve spent on an interesting Data Mining project. The aim of this data science exercise was to help business reduce customer handling time in a contact center. The project itself and the results we’ve achieved will be covered in my next article, but today I would like to share how I solved a technical issue that came up during the project.

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let’s be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let’s gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way – e.g., to establish a more effective team via becoming a real leader for the team.

Sure we do! But… Wait a minute. What is ESB? Is it yet another 10-year-old “fancy” technology on its way to Valhalla? Before answering these questions, let us first understand what does this term actually mean.

Siebel provides good tools for working with Siebel Hierarchies, e.g. a developer can query Siebel data using the EAI Siebel Adapter business service, transform the queried data into an instance of external integration object using the EAI Data Transformation Engine business service, and then send the result to an external system. If there are no complicated requirements, and the transformations are straightforward, most of Siebel developers can implement outbound or inbound web service in a couple of hours.

The pain

Imagine yourself in the middle of the integration process. You're staring at a requirement asking you to update, let's say a SiebelMessage, that was just queried, and is being processed by one of your workflows in order to be consumed by some 3^rd party system somewhere around the edge of the universe. But the update is not just an ordinary update, it has conditions. For example, “Action Code” of the Order Line Item to be passed for further transformation has to be “Add”, and the product of the same OLI has to be some kind of a phone, any kind you can imagine. Add a bit of sorting, a teaspoon of “Get The First That Matches The Condition”, a drop of “Delete That Element”, and you have your recipe of a complex and painful solution you are about to implement.

Java supports a lot of scripting languages, and since Java 6 it supports JavaScript out of the box. JDK 6 and JDK 7 both have embedded Rhino JavaScript engine that was developed by Mozilla. In JDK 8 though, the Rhino engine was replaced with Nashorn. Being the Rhino successor that was rewritten from scratch to meet modern script engine expectations, it offers a better performance, but since Java 8 is still not so widely adopted in the enterprise environments, let us focus on Rhino for now.

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let’s be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let’s gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way – e.g., overcome inability to act because of the state of panic caused by pushing factors, such as your project schedule.

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let’s be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let’s gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way. Sometimes, however, emotional breakdowns and feeling of failure slow us down considerably – so let us have a look at what can be done about that.

It seems rather obvious that modern applications should be structured in a way that permits an easy deployment to existing cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this article I will cover the Amazon solution, which is quite popular nowadays; there is, of course, also Google Computing Platform, which goes hand in hand with Amazon and offers more or less comparable core services, but let us focus on AWS for starters.

Why Outlook?

It isn't that much of a secret that Microsoft Outlook applications in conjunction Microsoft Exchange are a very popular piece of technology for enterprises. We have observed that enterprises generally use Outlook quite often, and most of our customers are also using Outlook as their core communication tool. Microsoft itself listed 12 reasons why users prefer Outlook over Gmail at work and these are the following:

Today we commonly feel the urge to move faster – take notice faster, learn faster, decide faster and act faster. It becomes a struggle. Still we can’t just decide: let's be faster. There are situations, behaviors, previous experience and other things slowing us down. Let's gather some analysis on what are the common situations asking for faster action, and what could be the simplest solutions at hand helping us find a way to move in a Fast Forward way (and mark those topics this way).

To start off, let’s address this simple point today: fast way of making easy to understand and easy to adjust mockups.

Sometimes it looks like a sales agent have just eaten a bucket of lemons when asked to use a CRM system. When that happens, CRM Desktop comes in: there is no need for special training, because most agents are familiar with Outlook – or a similar application. CRM Desktop allows managing enterprise data in sales agent’s native environment – be it Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes – and it is a truly offline solution. CRM Desktop was first made for Siebel, and it is now possible to use it with SAP CRM and Salesforce as well.

The insurance fraud problem is as old as the insurance industry itself. The magnitude of insurance fraud today is enormous, and it is not limited to a single geographic location. One company investigated an average of 300 suspicious claims a month in Slovakia in 2009 – and that is just one insurer in one small country of just over 5 million inhabitants.

What makes an upgrade project challenging? For the most part that’s the time gap between the source and the destination versions of the system; imagine migrating from something that is 8 years old, add some changes in the data model on top of that – and you’ll get a picture of what we have recently done for one of our clients, moving from Siebel v7.8 (SEA repository) to v8.1.1.10 (SIA repository). Regardless, the upgrade has been a success, and this is a story about it.

Our company employs over 50 Siebel consultants, which yields more than several hundred years of overall experience gained in different Siebel projects across the world. When most of us started with Siebel, we felt a huge demand for Siebel consultants, and usually we had a bunch of projects to choose from. However, some time ago we’ve noticed that this demand has started to decline. So for the last few years we find ourselves quite often in discussion of Siebel future. The idea of this post is to accumulate our thoughts on the subject and see whether the whole picture starts making any sense...

As the web evolves, more and more businesses are shifting their applications and data from internally hosted to the cloud. They provide publicly available APIs to expose valuable data (resources) and business functionality. To provide controlled access to exposed resources, API should be secured somehow, and that is where OAuth comes into play.

Most of our clients know at least one place in their Siebel solution, where they can click and then go grab some coffee while waiting for a response. Perhaps, there are such places in your Siebel system as well? Are users telling you that Siebel is slow? And do you know how to approach those issues?

In the previous article of this series we have done Siebel configuration, as well as presentation model and presentation renderer modifications, required for the bidirectional Siebel OpenUI – Google Maps integration. In this final article, let us have a look at what remains to be done to have a fully-fledged solution.

So you have your Siebel CRM system up and running, a lot of data has already been accumulated, and now the time has come to establish a better control over your business processes? Say, you want to see the overall sales dynamics, find out which of the products sells better, or who in the sales team is your star player? There are two distinct ways how you can accomplish this:

Last time we’ve seen how to transfer address information from Siebel to Google Maps and display a location on the map, i.e. implemented a unidirectional integration. Now the time has come to make the address data travel the other way around: from Google Maps picker to Siebel, so let us see what needs to be done to make it happen!

When trying to integrate Google Maps with any other system – such as Siebel – there are two possible approaches one could implement: a unidirectional integration, when the address data travels to Google Maps from the other system only (e.g., this is when you display an address stored in Siebel on the map), and a bidirectional integration, which basically entails unidirectional approach and on top of that – an ability to select and address in Google Maps picker and then transfer it back to the other system, such as Siebel.

Having been a Microsoft partner since 2010, Idea Port Riga has now achieved yet another major milestone in the partner program, becoming Microsoft Silver Partner in Application Development. This qualification requires both certified technology professionals on staff, and confirmed client references – thus emphasizing our ongoing commitment to creating, delivering and maintaining innovative custom solutions and services based on Microsoft technologies.

Thinking about Open UI, there are two most common perceptions around:

1. That’s something that changes the look and feel of Siebel
2. That’s something that helps developers deliver more

Both of these statements are true, but at the same time they illustrate the gap in understanding the Open UI scope; perhaps, we should rather view Siebel Open UI (OUI) as a standards-based, open architecture client that is supported by all browsers and provides end-user with a modern-looking UI. Let’s go through each of these key characteristics in a bit more detail.