Oracle OpenWorld 2014 - Back to the Future

Having to watch Oracle OpenWorld with several time zones between me and San Francisco has the benefit of getting enough sleep and waking up to interesting news. Again, we have to thank our friend Richard for going the extra mile of providing us with fresh-from-the-oven news from the Siebel sessions. Some of the announcements sound like from another planet indeed.

Artist from 1900 imagining 'Aero-Cabs' in 2000

So will we have something like flying taxis anytime soon? Probably not. But will we have Siebel Tools in a browser? Maybe that's not so far away.

http://localhost/tools_enu: we will probably sooner have this than flying cabs.

Obviously we are close to a radical shift in the way we work with Siebel CRM. From Richard's post, here are some highlights of the near future of Siebel, some of which were already mentioned in an earlier article.

The general idea is to web-enable the Siebel Tools application, which - when you look at it in the current Siebel Tools fat client - is just one of 80+ application definitions with a bunch of screens, views etc. So this makes total sense and editing Siebel metadata from a browser is just a natural thing to do. Put in some nice features such as conditional expressions, slick drag and drop editing and versioning and nothing is going to stop us ;-)

Getting rid of the need to compile (and distribute) the SRF and other files on Siebel servers such as web templates in order to make the development more agile is something that more and more customers demand from Oracle. I have once stumbled upon old Siebel documentation and an abstruse server parameter (which I cannot recall or find at the moment) which actually enabled an object manager to read metadata from the SRF or directly from the database. Maybe some Siebel veteran who reads this can confirm but the first Siebel versions did not have a SRF file (and neither did they have web templates) to my knowledge.

So everything that goes around comes around, just like Shuttle Applets which disappeared in Open UI (for 2 years) and magically come back (at least that's what the Siebel team is planning) in IP 2014.

have a nice day

@lex