Siebel CRM Patchset 12 for Innovation Pack 2013 is Available

Last Friday, Oracle has released patchset 12 for Innovation Pack 2013 marking one year since the inaugural release.

A quick glance at the Readme document (aka Installation Guide) puts this patchset into the 'lots of bugfixes' category, just like the previous one.

have a nice day

@lex

Oracle OpenWorld 2014: Strategy and Roadmap for Siebel CRM

Two weeks ago, at Oracle OpenWorld 2014, Oracle held several sessions which focused on the future of Siebel CRM - the world's most complete CRM, as we call it. Our friend and fellow blogger Richard was at the premises and shared many exciting articles (and screenshots) with us.

Now that the dust and excitement has somewhat settled, it's time to reiterate Oracle's statements.

Siebel CRM is at the Center of the Cloud (and it's not Alone)

An image says more than a thousand words. The following is taken from an Oracle presentation.

Personally, I think that this is the most important diagram for Oracle Applications customers at the moment. Oracle, their customers and partners are on their way of bringing decade-long investments in gargantuan on-premise deployments of eBusiness Suite, JDEdwards, PeopleSoft or Siebel CRM to the ever so promising cloud.

And the reality is that for most deployments of huge enterprise-class applications with millions or even billions of transactional records and up to several hundred of interfaces, you cannot just 'pull the plug' and move everything to the cloud.

So naturally, Oracle sees their Applications Cloud as a co-existence and enhancement option for existing investments in on-premise applications. And that means a bright future for Siebel CRM.

A Roadmap for Endurance and Agility

This is the roadmap diagram shown to customers at OpenWorld on various occasions.

Click to enlarge.

Yes, it says 2022+, so there's a commitment from Oracle of delivering yearly Innovation Packs and monthly fixpacks for the next 8 or more years.

Innovation Pack 2014

The imminent innovation pack for this year will bring a lot of new features and enhancements and here on Siebel Essentials we will certainly cover them all once the product is generally available. Some highlights to watch out for (remember this is a roadmap and not final features, the lists below are not meant to be comprehensive).

Siebel Open UI Features expected for IP 2014

• New single theme (responsive web design) for all applications (desktop and mobile). The message is "Create a view once and deploy it across desktops and tablets".
• Sidebar (hamburger) screen menu
• List column lock (freeze)
• iHelp
• Flowchart editors (Marketing, Loyalty, Smart Scripts, iHelp, etc.)
• Hierarchy diagrams
• (Oracle) map renderer
• Calendar enhancements
• Edit and save attachments inline
• Expression Editor
• Refurbished Quote and Order screens
• Product Configurator administration views
• New communications panel

We've come a long way, haven't we?

What to expect for Siebel Mobile Applications in IP 2014

For Siebel Mobile Applications, the Open UI enhancements listed above mean actually a lot:

Everything that you missed in IP 2013 or before because Siebel Mobile Applications used different renderers (based on jQuery Mobile which will be NO LONGER used in IP 2014) is coming back because now there's a single theme for ALL applications. So this will be soon available on a tablet near you, regardless of what application you're running.

• MVG (Shuttle)
• Search
• Date Picker
• Signature Capture
• ...literally everything you have on the desktop, you will be able to use on the tablet.

Besides those already good news, Oracle plans to publish a new mobile application for Financial Services and a container app that allows better access to the device.

In addition, there are several enhancements planned for Mobile Disconnected Applications.

Other Features expected for IP 2014

• CRM Desktop for Service and Financial Services
• New OUI installers for Mobile/Developer Web Client and Siebel Tools
• Simplified IRM process

2015 and Beyond

As demonstrated by Oracle last week, Siebel CRM is headed for the cloud in earnest. This was the slide that made the audience hold their breath.

No more SRF, no file based configuration, no web templates. That's what it says. So it seems to be almost certain that there will be a time without Siebel Tools as we know it and the object manager will read all configuration metadata from the repository in the database.

When we log in to Siebel Web Tools (I made this name up) some day from now and relish in the web based IDE, will we miss the Siebel Tools fat client?

Summary

The Siebel CRM sessions at Oracle OpenWorld 2014 clearly demonstrated Oracle's commitment to the world's most complete CRM product. For the Siebel-believers that is expected and very good news. And for those who want to see Siebel CRM dead...well, it's here to stay, get over it.

If you want to check out the presentations from OpenWorld for yourself, you can find them on the Oracle Learning Library (OLL).

have a nice day

@lex

Speech To Text Awesomeness in Siebel Open UI - Part 2

Welcome back to the second and final part of our speech to text tutorial (complete with awesome fonts).

In the first part, we created a custom PR for the Contact Form Applet and put all the Font Awesome files in the right places.

Today it's time to tackle the PR code in earnest. Remember we want to achieve the following:

• Display a microphone button in a text field using a scalable icon by Font Awesome
• Allow speech input using the HTML5 Web Speech API
• Animate the microphone icon during recording with CSS animation
• Write the recognized text to a field according using the Siebel Open UI API (of course)
• Play back the recorded text using the HTML5 Speech Synthesis API

So let's open our primordial physical renderer and implement the following code inside the ShowUI method:

Click to enlarge (yeah I know, it's just a screenshot)
Grab the full code here.

Let's walk through the code line by line:

• First, we 'get' the GetControls property to initialize the controls variable with the current array of applet controls.
• Then we obtain a handle on the JobTitle control as the JobTitleControl variable.
• The if block helps us to verify that the JobTitle control exists and that the browser supports the HTML5 Speech Recognition API with this code:
  if (JobTitleControl && 'webkitSpeechRecognition' in window) {In case the window object does not 'know' of the webkitSpeechRecognition method, the code within the if block is not executed (i.e. nothing happens).
• If we have speech recognition, we do the following:
• Get the value of the name attribute of the JobTitle control (i.e. the Id) and use it to create a jQuery selector.
• Create a new DIV element with the class attribute set to s2tbutton fa fa-microphone. The fa (Font Awesome) class is necessary that the DIV displays a microphone icon.
• Now we create a webkitSpeechRecognition object using the line
  var recognition = new webkitSpeechRecognition();The object has various methods, one of which allow to set the code for the language to be interpreted. In our example we set recognition.lang="en-GB" to interpret the spoken text as British English.
• Using the onresult event handler we can define a function that is invoked when the recognition process ends. But first let's stay outside this function as it is not invoked yet (this happens when a recording ends).
• Next we add a custom class to the JobTitle control to allow custom styling.
• Then we use the jQuery append method to add the button DIV to the control's parent element.
• Finally we define a click event handler on the button which does two things:
• Start the recognition (this will cause the browser to display an 'allow/deny' prompt to the user).
• Toggle the button class to allow some animation.
• Let's look back at the onresult event handler function and imagine that speech recognition has ended. Then we do the following:
• Toggle the active class on the button (to end the animation)
• Get the transcript (the recognized text) from the event object (quite a stretch)
• Execute the SetFormattedValue method on the PM, passing the JobTitle control object and the recognized text as follows:
  that.GetPM().ExecuteMethod("SetFormattedValue", JobTitleControl, transcript);After consulting with fellow author Duncan Ford and the Siebel Open UI development team, this is the right way to "set a field value". The SetFormattedValue method triggers all the right spots in the framework. Remember, we should stay away from interacting directly with the BC.
• The rest is just for fun and plays back the recognized text with a default synthesized voice:
  var msg = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("Did you just say: " + transcript + "?");window.speechSynthesis.speak(msg);

As you see in the example code, there are some class references, so let's add the following CSS rules to a custom style sheet:

/* Text 2 Speech */

.s2tbutton {

    position: relative;

    right: 13px;

    top: 2px;

    font-size: 8pt;

    cursor: pointer;

}

.s2tbutton.active{

    text-shadow: 0px 0px 7px rgba(255,0,0,0.9);

    color: red;

    -webkit-animation: throbber 1s .165s infinite steps(3);

}

.s2tinput{

    width: 120px!important;

    text-transform: capitalize;

}

@-webkit-keyframes throbber {

    0%   {color: #000;}

    33%  {color: #f00;}

    100% {color: #000;}

}

The s2tbutton class controls the appearance of the idle microphone button.

The s2tbutton.active rule defines a red shadow and font color. Using the -webkit-animation property  we define a 'throbber' animation that has a 1 second duration and loops ad infinitum through three steps. The steps are defined using the webkit-keyframes "at-rule", so that the color goes from black to red and back. Thanks to Duncan for this cool animation.

The s2tinput class controls the appearance of the JobTitle control which we make a bit wider and apply capitalization to the text (because the speech recognition actually returns lowercase text).

Finally, let's fire up Google Chrome for a test.

The screenshot shows the Siebel client after clicking the microphone button (which is 'throbbing'). The browser prompts for allowance or denial.

Once we click the Allow button we can say the text, for example "Vice President"

A few moments after we stop speaking, the recognized text (not always exactly what you've said, but this time it's ok :) is set as the new field value.

Summary

What started as a simple demo with one line of code (that got deprecated) became a veritable journey into HTML5 speech recognition and synthesis. We added some (font) awesomeness to it by using a scalable icon which we animated with CSS.

For real life scenarios, I think that especially mobile users would benefit a lot from speech input, even more for longer text. It would also be interesting to explore all the options of the speech API such as allowing the user to select the spoken language or displaying the text as she or he speaks.

Download the full example PR here.

Download the CSS example here.

have a nice day

@lex

Speech To Text Awesomeness in Siebel Open UI - Part 1

If you have been following the various articles in the Siebel Open UI realm over the past two years you have probably seen a demonstration of speech recognition to provide field values via the device microphone.

The example code with this demo boils down to one line like this:

$('input[name="' + controlInputName + '"]').attr("x-webkit-speech","x-webkit-speech");

The above code is adding the x-webkit-speech attribute to a text input control so that we can simply click or tap a microphone icon and start speaking. Note that only Google Chrome supported this feature. Supported? Read on...

As you also probably know, this humble writer and his fellow authors are working on the Siebel Open UI Developer's Handbook (to be released early 2015). Of course, we aim to provide as many working examples as possible and the speech-to-text demo is something we have on our list.

However, while creating the demo code for the book we found to our dismay that the x-webkit-speech attribute is deprecated. Bummer...

HTML5 Rocks

This is where HTML5 (and any browser that supports it) comes to the rescue with the Speech Recognition (Web Speech) and Speech Synthesis API. Support for these APIs is currently limited to Google Chrome and Apple Safari browsers.

So we set out to give speech recognition in Siebel Open UI another chance and are happy to provide a working solution using the HTML5 APIs. In this and the following post we will describe how to use the following ingredients to create a custom physical renderer for a form applet:In 

• Display a microphone button in a text field using a scalable icon by Font Awesome
• Allow speech input using the HTML5 Web Speech API
• Animate the microphone icon during recording with CSS animation
• Write the recognized text to a field according using the Siebel Open UI API (of course)
• Play back the recorded text using the HTML5 Speech Synthesis API

Let's get started with a screenshot:

The highlighted microphone icon (in the Job Title control) is all the user can see. Tapping/clicking the icon will cause the browser (again: only Chrome or Safari support currently support this) to prompt the user that the web page wants access to the device microphone. After allowing that, the user can talk. Once she or he finishes talking, the field will be updated with the recognized text.

In the remainder of this first part we will lay out the foundation in terms of creating and registering a boilerplate PR and downloading the necessary files for Font Awesome.

1. Create and Register a Boilerplate PR

We assume a certain familiarity with Open UI at this point, so all we do here is create a new custom physical renderer file in the siebel/custom folder from a template.

• We suggest that you name the file ContactSpeech2TextPR.js.
• If you use the Siebel Essentials PR Template, continue by replacing all occurrences of 'PRTemplate' with 'ContactSpeech2TextPR'.
• Next, ensure that the call to SiebelJS.Extend looks like the following to have a proper extension for a form applet:

SiebelJS.Extend(ContactSpeech2TextPR, SiebelAppFacade.PhysicalRenderer);

At this point, the PR does not do much apart from printing messages to the console (at least that's what our template does), but that's ok for now.

Next, we register the new file in the Manifest Files view:

Off we go to the Manifest Administration view and associate the file with the Contact Form Applet for the sake of demo.

Finally, log off and on again and verify that the PR is loaded (look at the JavaScript console for the log messages if you're using the Siebel Essentials template).

If you are already a Siebel Open UI veteran, you might well be annoyed by this level of detail here. Here at Siebel Essentials we aim to please juniors and seniors alike. So if you can't wait and want to jump ahead, here is the complete example PR (with full speech recognition and synthesis). Note that you also need Font Awesome files and some custom CSS, so reading on is recommendable.

Prepare for Font Awesome

Font Awesome is an open source icon and CSS toolkit which provides hundreds of vector icons. The benefit of using scalable font icons instead of image files becomes clear when you consider different zoom levels, the amount and size of files to be downloaded and whether you want to be old-school or just cool ;-)

For "ninja-style" testing you can include Font Awesome in any web page (including Open UI) with one line of JavaScript like the following:

$("head").append('<link href="//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.2.0/css/font-awesome.min.css" rel="stylesheet">');

Of course the above will require that your browser can reach the public internet. For a real-life Siebel production environment, we will be better off if we download the source files and put it on our own Siebel web server. Here is how to accomplish this:

1. Go to Fort Awesome and download the latest source archive.
2. Open the archive and extract the font-awesome.css file to the PUBLIC/%Language%/FILES/custom folder. Do not use the minified version (some editing is necessary so we better use the original file).
3. Create a FONTS folder in PUBLIC/%Language% (Note: This folder will be present in future Siebel versions, so you probably only have to do this only if you're on IP 2013).
4. Create a custom sub-folder within the FONTS folder.
5. From the Font Awesome archive, extract all font files to the PUBLIC/%Language%/FONTS/custom folder.
6. Edit the font-awesome.css file and replace all occurrences of '../fonts/' with '../../fonts/custom/' to comply with the placement of files in the Siebel PUBLIC folder.
7. Edit the custom theme.js file (that you hopefully have at this point, if not look here for a start on custom themes) and add a reference to the font-awesome.css file similar to the following example:

SiebelApp.ThemeManager.addResource(
    "TANGERINE_TAB",
    { css : {  fa: "files/custom/font-awesome.css"
        }}); 

Note that this applies to IP 2013. There is a high probability for future posts on custom themes in IP 2014...
Repeat the above step for any standard and custom theme you might be using.

Quite a stretch for a small icon but now we have the full power of Font Awesome at our fingertips.

Please also visit the next part where we will actually bring all the pieces together to capture your beautiful speaking voice in the Siebel database ;-)

have a nice day

@lex

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

Simplify Your Life with Functional Setup Manager

When you find yourself in the admin seat in front of Oracle Fusion Functional Setup Manager (FSM), you might have a lot of tasks to juggle.

What most admins do is to simply search for the task like this:

To give FSM some credit, the search is case insensitive and retrieves any task (or task list) that contains the search string.

Personally, I found myself more than once in the situation where I mistyped or plainly forgot the "key word". And scrolling is not an option...

Custom Task List to the Rescue!

With kudos to fellow Oraclean Kevin, we can of course resort to creating a custom task list. Just go to Manage Task Lists and Tasks and click the Create Task List button.

Name your task list and add any existing task:

Once you're done you can start using your custom task list in FSM and forget about remembering task names.

have a nice day

@lex

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 - Siebel Strategy Update

With great delight we follow the news from the US west coast, where fellow Siebel blogger and friend Richard from On Demand Education managed to get a seat in what we imagine to be a standing-room session.

In his article (please click here to read the full article and see all 'screenshots'), Richard points out the following important bits of information for everyone working with Siebel CRM.

• 84% of the customer base is on the latest Siebel release (8.1.1. or 8.2.2)
• Siebel CRM is a vital part of Oracle's CX strategy
• The roadmap for Siebel now extends to 2022 and beyond

In the (very) near future, we will see the release of IP 2014 which will provide fodder for many a post (not to mention that the Open UI related enhancements will make it into our planned book). Here are some key announcements for IP 2014:

• Responsive Web Design (RWD) for Siebel Open UI will enable customers to use any Siebel application on any device.
• New 'container' app for mobile applications with enhancements for disconnected mobile applications.
• Industry applications updates for Communications, Financial Services and Public Sector.
• CRM Desktop for Service.

Richard also lets us partake on the planned features for Siebel CRM that we will (probably) see in the not so near future (after IP 2015, but I'm just guessing). Those features are on the rumor mill for a while now.

• "Tools on the web"
• No SRF, no web templates
• Role based runtime configuration

But see for yourself in Richard's comprehensive article.

Of course, there are many others keeping us up to date on the Siebel strategy, such as Manuel Breschi from e-Up. Please click here to read his point of view on Oracle's Siebel strategy.

have a nice day

@lex