TechLife: Idea Port Riga blog about mobile, web and integration solutions for enterprises

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.