On his
On Demand Education blog, my friend, book reviewer and overall good guy Richard Napier recently started a series of posts on the integration of
Legodo CCS (Customer Communication Suite) and Siebel CRM.
 |
| Image Source: legodo.com |
***
Richard writes:
Legodo CCS � Why Siebel Consultants should know about CCSLegodo / Actuate CCS � a Series of Overviews for Siebel People
As many of you read on the various websites like
Siebel Observer, Actuate Corporation recently acquired
Legodo AG, a German company based in Karlsruhe.
You, our dear readers, may be wondering what this company provides, and may be thinking about what this company means in the Siebel ecosystem. We at ODE think you need to know about this product and what it can do for your Siebel Enterprise customers.
ODE reached out to the company shortly after the news of the acquisition, and despite being very busy the company responded with lots of enthusiasm and information. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Sven, Martin and Manuel who were so kind to get involved in the process of getting ODE access to the software and helping us set it up with a Siebel Enterprise instance. So we are going to be giving you a couple of posts to discuss why Legodo (Actuate) CCS needs to be on every Siebel consultant�s radar:
- Overview of the Product
- Key Differentiators
- Functionality that your customer needs
Now on to our first post about the Customer Communication Suite � Let us start by making some big picture statements. Not all of them are true for every CRM customer, but we are willing to bet that you have met many of them.
Generating documents (Word, PDF, HTML, MHTML, Emails, SMS, and Fax etc) in a CRM system such as Siebel is often a pain point. Thinking back to the �good old days� we would use Siebel Correspondence and be frustrated by the performance issues and stability � actually we would just question the concept of using Microsoft Word as the generation engine in an environment where we want to be generating hundreds of documents a second. As a friend said the other day,
that architecture was out of date ten years ago.
Creating report or document templates for use in Siebel or another partner application has never truly been open to the end user. One way or another, the different tools at our disposal have been too complicated or too unfriendly to give to a typical user of Microsoft Word. Some tools have been better than others, but most fail either at the document creation and process, or the document management / upload level.
Embedding business logic into the creation of documents has always been a struggle. Sure we can create snazzy documents and let Siebel users generate them by clicking on a list of �Siebel Reports�. But when it comes to stipulating that document A is not appropriate for customer 1, or that this document is only appropriate for Gold Customers, or that this document should only be emailed not printed, or that such and such a block of text is recommended in a particular context, then we struggle, let alone using different channels (SMS, Fax, Email and so on).
Updating Templates usually involves compilation, Integration Object changes and so on, slowing down the process and making it harder for the end Word user to be comfortable with their design tools. There are a number of other pain points but most people will share some of these I am sure. So with that in mind, here is an overview of Legodo / Actuate CCS. It is comprised of several parts
Server Management application This application is the technical hub of the Suite. In here you will find the application setup, the connectivity to Siebel as well as the mappings between Siebel concepts and Legodo objects. At a simple level, this is where the structures we know as Business Objects and Components and Fields are mapped. Interestingly, the tool does not use Integration Objects, reading instead directly from the Repository tables which lessens the workload to deliver changes.
It also uses industry standard techniques (XSLT, XML) to get complex jobs done like mapping CCS output to Siebel. As a result, it makes it easier to find out what is going on, and to consult the output of a given session. Even ODE could do some debugging and fix an issue in this way, after only a few hours of operation. For our demonstration platform we were able to mount the server and the other components on Apache, which meant a quick and easy start! There is a whole slew of functionality that is business driven, such as defining which users can access which partner systems (Siebel, SAP etc), what business rules are applied to business processes (for example, apply the Gold Customer rule to a process to avoid the wrong document being printed for the wrong types of customer) and so on. We will investigate some of the key features in a later post.
About the CCS DesignerSure, we have heard about
MS Word Plugins before. But too often they are not business driven and don�t really speak to the report designer, more to a nebulous person called a report developer who wouldn�t have to exist in an ideal world. CCS Designer comes closest to the goal of business user-focus. The wizards are very easy to use, very simple to understand. CCS (wisely in my opinion) splits the wizard into two separate worlds � �business� and �technical� views that can be switched between depending on the user and what you are trying to do, so the information you get is not trying to be �all things to all people all of the time� which can make for an overload of information to view (and thus a big turn-off for report designers).
Particularly useful is the simple structure of the document (reusable text blocks, fields and other text) and the powerful tools to filter usage of a document and make it easier for the end users to make the right choices. For example, the ability to make text blocks no longer available, or to create them for availability in the future.
End User InteractionAfter all this designer-related power and flexibility, it is nice to see the end user is not neglected either. Accessing CCS from Siebel or another Partner system displays a great dialogue. Organized templates, a preview, channel options and more give the user a flexible modern interface. It makes some of the things we have to put up with look really old-fashioned.
vs
Of course the comparison is maybe not a fair one. CCS is so far into the realm of correspondence that mere report-generators cannot compete.
Naturally, the templates, options and channels available have all been set up in the application to ensure that only the right documents are available to the right people in the right format. And furthermore , design of business processes means the ability to communicate with the Partner System and work with native Siebel concepts like Actions.
The level of control of business processes extends right into documents that may be generated � notice in the screenshot below that the CCS end-user toolbar only offers the options to Print or Save, and that native functionality has been disabled.
There is so much more to CCS than this short post, and we will be investigating some more of the functionality in a short series.
For now though, let us leave you with a quote from a well-known reference customer (we will share another couple in the next post) :-
�
With Legodo, we can deliver customer relevant correspondence in the right context and at the right ti me � easily, directly, and with a personal touch of course.� Christian Viatte, Manager Service Champion Program, Swisscom
You can
download the full Legodo / Swisscom PDF here. Until next time!
The original article can be found here.
***
have a nice day
@lex
