Siebel IP2018 Upgrade: 7 things to help make a success of it

If you haven’t moved to the Siebel IP2018 upgrade, what’s keeping you?

Over the last 12 months, we've seen the agility of Oracle’s on-premise CRM upgrade, the Siebel IP2018 upgrade, delivering real business value such as greater flexibility to tweak and refine the application, easier migration, improved testing capabilities and new interfaces.

Ultimately, this could be the last ‘big’ upgrade as Oracle moves to a continuous patch release pattern that, coupled with the inbuilt automated testing, will reduce the time it takes businesses to benefit from Oracle’s latest innovations.

I was lucky enough to be involved in two projects that used the latest upgrade - one involved developing a previously upgraded IP2018 environment for a financial services company and the other involved a full upgrade for a well known public sector company. I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to share a few observations for anyone looking to take the leap towards the latest Siebel upgrade.

1. Innovate with more flexibility using the Continuous Release Method #

For IP2018, Oracle is releasing monthly patches, breaking the typical annual ‘all-in-one’ release tradition. With this model, Siebel customers get greater patching flexibility and quicker fixes. Learn more about the Continuous Release Method.

2. Empower developers with Parallel Development #

Workspaces are the clearest feature that enables Parallel Development, allowing developers to work on the same repository objects at the same time. Therefore, any update in a developer environment won't affect other developers. However, the Application Container (Apache Tomcat) for the Application Interface (AI), the new Web Server, also allows Parallel Development by using different sets of static files without the need for an extra environment to divide the development for different projects.

3. Say goodbye to laborious migrations with the migration application #

A web-based tool for migration of Siebel Repositories and seed data is introduced with Siebel IP2018. It uses an easy interface that includes an integrated method for migrating, which no longer requires you to run each of the steps manually.

4. Speed up an implementation with Test Automation #

The Siebel CRM Open UI Test Automation tool provides a built-in automated testing function. It reduces the time dedicated to testing scripts, increases the maintainability of these processes and increases testing effectiveness by reproducing user actions thanks to the Usage Pattern Tracking functionality (we first noticed this great opportunity way back in 2015!).

5. List of Value (LOV) configurations need to go through Workspaces #

Any LOV Object configuration in Siebel IP2018 must be made via Workspaces. As test and production environments are not Workspace-enabled then any change of LOVs in these environments can only be implemented with a migration from a development environment. (Oracle has indicated that this will change in a Patch Set soon to be released).

6. The time to move to Strongly-Typed (ST) scripting is now #

WebTools provides some problems when the ST Scripting Engine is disabled. This is seen as a nudge to all customers that are using the old T Scripting Engine. As a workaround, the enabling of the ST Scripting Engine can be changed whenever WebTools needs to be used for maintaining T-Scripts until a proper migration to ST is completed.

7. Keep a backup of Zookeeper #

The Apache Zookeeper application keeps control of the Siebel Enterprise Architecture configuration (i.e. the Gateway registry; the old siebns.dat file). It provides easier ways to configure certain aspects of the architecture, such as the new gateway clustering functionality (which allows you to access one gateway if another fails).

In early stages of projects, its stability can be an issue and the gateway registry can be corrupted, so make sure you backup the registry to enable a quick restore!

One small step to IP2018 - one big step for your CRM strategy #

Lots of interesting new functionalities are incorporated with the new Siebel IP2018 version and most of the challenges relate to adapting to new ways of working with Siebel.

In addition, ahead, there are more interesting changes and functionalities which will be built on core changes added in IP2018. Many of these future functionalities were presented at the last Oracle OpenWorld 2018.

Learn more #

Looking for some help upgrading or enhancing your Siebel environment to unlock its full potential? Take a look at what we can do.

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