Throughout the year Oracle will run a number of Oracle Cloud Implementation Workshops for partners. These will including Sales, Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Financials, Project Portfolio Management, Procurement, Human Capital Management and Business Intelligence Cloud Service. These are Invite-Only hands-on workshops delivered by Oracle Development at no fee for partners. Well, Gold+ partner level is required to attend.

The workshops consists of live Webex presentations, live demos and hands-on laboratory exercises.

Oracle Gold+ Partner? See this link for additional information.

– Jeroen

You might or might not have tried this yet. But with R15.0 it was not possible to create an overriding theme, based of the Simplified UI (SUI). I hit this issue while working on visualizing the application menu in a recent post.

First of all, I should not be calling out “Simplified UI” anymore, but call in Synergy.

Last week I took the short-cut by modifying the out-of-the-box theme-sui.css. That is alright to proof the concept, but it should be well known that modification of such deliverables is not recommended.

Because one of my customers will be deploying the Synergy theme, I started researching a bit further why the traditional (and documented) way of adding an overriding theme did not work.

1) Created a LOV for the new theme “SUI Custom”
2) Created a custom .css with the overrides called “theme-sui-custom.css”
3) Create a manifest file entry for this (files/custom/theme-sui-custom.css”
4) Created a manifest admin entry for Application / Theme / PLATFORM_DEPENDENT
5) Added as files with Seq 1 the theme-sui.css and with Seq 2 the theme-sui-custom.css
6) Set the user pref to “SUI Custom” and restart the application.

The end result was terrible :-(

Not only the toolbar menu got messed up, there were other anomalies too. But why? After some further research in appears the the SUI theme is not fully implemented as CSS theme, rather there are also modifications in client side proxies.

Reaching out to product development brought the solution. Creating overriding themes for R15 will be provided per upcoming patch set, targeted for the very first R15.1 patch set. The overall procedure will match the existing procedure. That said, if the Synergy theme needs to be overridden, the language independent code for the new theme should always be prefixed with “SUI_THEME_”.

Other than that, a few additional color schemes will be provided as well.

– Jeroen

As with new Innovation Packs of Siebel in the past years, the Premier Support period has extended on the same pace. Although the Lifetime Support Policy document has not been updated (version May 2015) to reflect the General availability of Siebel 15, it does reflect the release of Siebel Innovation Pack 2014. The latter got released last November hence the GA + 5 years rule applied, makes Premier Support to run throughout November 2019.

– Jeroen

On June 30th Oracle released Siebel 14.7 and Siebel 15.1 Patch Sets. No co-incidence that both share the same date and release notes. From a code-line perspective they are the same.These releases just differ from a configuration and seed-data perspective.It greatly further enhances Oracle’s development agility in terms of bug fixing and quality assurance, improving reliability and time-to-market.

What I cannot yet explain though is why 15.1 is 9GB+ in size, where 14.7 is more like the usual in size. Basically it is a full installation. I can imagine it being due to a blocking defect for 8.2.2.x customers, where the DB Upgrade phase failed miserably. Assumption seems to be confirmed by the fact the download on the Software Delivery Cloud has been updated too.

Siebel Patchset Installation Guides for Siebel Innovation Packs (Doc ID 1614310.1)

That said, starting with this release, Patch Sets will also be installed using Oracle’s Universal Installer (OUI). Not a very big deal if you ask me. We still rely on oPatch for patch set verification purposes (e.g. – lsinventory) or rollback procedures.

Please check the release notes for all of the details. The Patch Set has quite a number of fixes and enhancements. To call out a couple by name:

USERS DO NOT SEE THE SPINNING WHEEL CONSTANTLY BETWEEN WHEN THEY ENTER THEIR PASSWORD AND WHEN THE APPLICATION LOADS

It addresses the issue that during logon, the spinning wheel only starts up displaying relatively late. Especially if the user’s browser cache is empty or due to static content expiration files are being downloaded again, the user might feel nothing is happening. Good UX improvement. This issue is even more important for Citrix / IE deployments (specifically IE), where typically the IE cache is not persisted between Citrix sessions, as not part of the user’s profile.

ENHANCES JAVASCRIPT PERFORMANCE FOR OPEN UI APPLICATIONS

Development further improved OpenUI performance by eliminating unnecessary or expensive JQuery selectors. To name a few:

1) Ensuring that no redundant calls are being made to re-generate tabbed links for view navigation when there are no changes.
2) Ensuring that duplicate calls for modifying value in DOM element are being suppressed.
3) Reducing dependency on querySelectorAll API usage
4) Calling .empty.append for large string instead of using .html since it does regular expression check which consumes good amount of time.
5) Deferring span tag generation for iconmaps etc.

Enjoy!

– Jeroen

Neeraj posted me the question the other day how to re-introduce the record selector as we knew it in the High Interactivity days (and even well before those…). Yes, that function got dropped. But it does serve its purpose.

Initially I thought about introducing a dummy column to hold a glyph for the selector. Had a quick chat with Duncan as I often do to exchange thoughts. He reminded me about the “Client-side controls” feature introduced in Innovation Pack 2014. Due to a lack of time I dropped the ball. Until this afternoon, where Duncan replied about a pure CSS solution he crafted. It was elegant in its simplicity. The use of the nth-child selector does the magic. The first column in a list applet actually is a hidden multi-selector column (see my older post on the subject). So the second column is our target to dynamically introduce a small glyph. Duncan opted just to take one which suits from the “oracle” font which comes along with Siebel. But if you wish you can go wild.

End-result already pretty neat:

What I personally did not like, is the indented text in case a record selector is presented. So I went on with Duncan’s proposal and improved the UX a bit further (well, I hope so). Just a few little tweaks to the CSS.

And the result would be along these lines:

As always, implement theme overrides in a customized theme. And you should be good to go. I implemented on IP15. Solution works for both Synergy theme as well as the Aurora theme.

– Jeroen

An initial attempt to bring back the record selector, worked out pretty well. As initial attempt :-). But it did have some deficits.

• Impossible to distinguish the last selected record. This is especially useful while using the out-of-the-box merge functionality. The last record selected will become the survivor record;
• The picklist, mvg or calculator icon disappears for the first list column;
• Cosmetic: vertical alignment of the selector once a list control gets entered.

The screenshot below shows the more appropriate appearance of the drop-down glyph. In the initial attempt, it got pushed out as the list control grew too large. I had to tweak a bit, and resolved it using a calculated width value. The 20px equals the amount of space I added as text-indent too.

width: calc(100% – 20px) !important;

I changed the appearance for the last (or only…) record selected. Choose one you like. It also aligns now vertically. Obviously the vertical spacing might need to be changed per case, depending on the row-height for the list applets. For practical reasons in most cases the row-height should be reduced from the out-of-the-box look and feel. To fix the issue with the pushed out picklist, mvg or any other type of icon, I adjusted the margin by again the same fixed number of pixels I added as text-ident. It requires a bit of fiddling with CSS is you are not fully comfortable in this area like me.

tr.ui-row-ltr > td[role=’gridcell’]:nth-child(2) > span { /* Record selector */ margin: 0 0 0 -49px; /* from -29px to -49px */ }

The following screenshot shows once multiple records have been selected.

So, complete CSS snippet required has grown a bit to accommodate the behavior.

 You can grab the complete snippet of CSS here. Enjoy! – Jeroen

The Oracle Documents Cloud is one of those Oracle PaaS services which would make a lot of sense to consider in conjunction with an on-premise run Siebel implementation. Alright, you need to have trust in “the” Cloud. And agree – this remains a major hurdle for many enterprises today, storing your sensitive data in some unknown data center far away, managed by unknown administrators and accessible outside the boundaries of the company.

But if you take a step back from those security concerns for a while… Many customers today are using the traditional Siebel File System, only a minority are using content management solutions such as Oracle’s Universal Content Management or competitive solutions to Oracle’s such as Documentum, Filenet or such. Using the Siebel File System comes with its limitations. No version control, no way to easily share documents, no collaboration (“the record has been modified by another user sounds familiar…?”). Well, the Siebel File System is just the bare minimum you’d expect from a CRM application. But then really, the bare minimum.

With Oracle Document Cloud this changes the picture quite a bit. It’s a full-fledged enterprise-grade solution. Is does have a desktop-sync client for Windows and Mac as well as a secury iOS and Android app. I know, these are the conveniences from Dropbox too, but then far more secure. Access control can be integrated with your the company’s IDM solution for granting and revoking access. Auditing of document access, and modification is part of the product too. Plus it comes with an extensive REST API too…

With all that in mind, Oracle crafted an integration between both and drafted a whitepaper on the same topic. So basically a  direction for customers to consider (whitepaper: “…meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision…“). Not a productized solution. Typically if customer demand is strong enough, Oracle might consider it for “productization” at a later stage (yes, that apparently is a proper word).

Today, July 9th a demo got published on Youtube.

 
Reading through the whitepaper it certainly reached the state of a proof of concept, but I would not consider it production-ready yet. Although the proposed configuration in the whitepaper has been tested against Siebel 15.0, there is no reason why it should not work with Innovation Packs 2012 – 2014. Personally I would refrain from using IFrame-based symbolic URLs. Rather craft a physical renderer for that purpose, and make it behave responsive too.

In an upcoming post I will discuss my first experiences with the Document Cloud solution.

Here’s the full link to the MOS DocId: Siebel CRM – Oracle Documents Cloud Service Integration (Doc ID 2018941.1).

Stay tuned.

– Jeroen Burgers

From time to time I run my benchmark tests. To see if technical improvements did materialize in tangible performance benefits. It has been a while I ran these, but with the general availability of IP15.1/14.7 I reckoned it would be a great moment to take a step back and compare apples again. The primary browsers are Chrome (R43) and 11.0.9600.17832CO Update 11.0.20 (that means including the June 2015 cumulative updated).

At this stage I compared three apples:

• Patchset 14.4 (March 2015)
• Patchset 15.0 (May 2015)
• Patchset 15.1/14.7 (June 2015)

IP15.1 and 14.7 technically are build on the same code base. That means that all delivered code in these patch sets is 100% identical. But still, these are two different applications, right? Right. Because of the different repositories, other seed-data and items like additional themes the functionality is different. If you’d look at performance of both, it would make little sense to test them both. So I don’t. To make the comparison match, I will use the same Aurora theme (since the Synergy theme is non-existent in Innovation Pack 2014).

As a testing strategy I use my set of 4 views. These views range from little complexity to very complex. Still the simplest view is a parent-child view. Parent is a form applet with 99 (!) controls. The child is a list applet with about 80 (!) list columns. The most complex view has 4 form applets with each 99 controls, and 4 list applets with 80 controls. I would not recommend creating anything like this for production use, but as matter of comparison it works just fine.

To measure the time it takes to build the view, I use a measurement framework. Which basically times the lapse between “preload” and “postload”. The time lapse between these two events consumes the majority of the time spent in the Open UI framework. It does exclude CSS processing though. I take the measurements always on an unloaded system. And I have a clear look at the task manager too, to ensure CPU shows low levels of activity. To get accurate figures, I take a number of samples. Looking at the Standard Deviation will tell whether the measurements have potential outliers or not.

So what are the results? First of all, the difference between IE11 and Chrome remains about a factor two. This is quite a stable factor over the past year. All the efforts MS has put into IE11 has not moved it much closer to its rival.

That is what the graph tries to tell. For example: IE11 consumes 209% of the time Chrome does for the most complex view view on IP15.0.

That said, if we set all measurements side-by-side you get a grasp on the evolution. There is clearly a declining line between 14.4, 15.0 and 15.1. Interestingly, there is a big improvement for IE11 on 15.1/14.7. I did take these measurements a couple of times to be sure. But true, there is quite a significant improvement for IE. Hooray!

This all demonstrates the efforts Oracle development is putting in materializing improvements in performance. This really is not a simple task, since the Open UI framework heavily relies on JQuery. And there are many JQuery patters (e.g. JQuery selectors) which can be extremely costly for JQuery. But also smaller things like “for” loops, which tend to be 20% slower than “do-while” loops. Imagine if you have loops over large objects or arrays, that can count up (and it does).

Here are the results.

Enjoy the weekend or your holidays!

– Jeroen

Darshan Kumar yesterday posted an article showing different visualizations of the Synergy UI. This requires Innovation Pack 2015 Patchset 1. As I discussed in a previous post, due to a product defect you’d be unable to override the Synergy UI (under the hood still named Simplified UI). That issue has been straightened in Patchset 1.

Although the Synergy UI looks aesthetically pleasing, it has some drawbacks to render the Siebel UI this way. In that sense, that IMHO important and useful functionality got suppressed.

Well, the application menu already revealed itself in a previous post. Although I improved it a bit further, so that it hides in case of Homepages views.

Similarly I was missing the Thread bar quite a bit. So I thought it would not be bad idea to render it again. Maybe aesthetically less pleasing to the eye, but it’s a very useful navigation feature. I decided as well to hide it on Home page views.

Just a few CSS tweaks all together.

You can grab the CSS here

– Jeroen.

Although in Innovation Pack 2015 the CRM Composer is only implemented for a sneak-peak or developer preview of what is coming, this webcast will deep-dive into this important strategic direction Oracle is heading with with Siebel. Excited?

Follow this link for more details:

UPCOMING ADVISOR WEBCAST: New Feature of IP2015: Siebel Composer replacing Siebel Tools (Doc ID 2023750.1)

Abstract:

This one-hour advisor webcast is recommended for Technical Users, Siebel Developers who are using Siebel Tools for configuring Siebel Objects. The main target of the Webinar would be to familiarize Siebel Composer, the new feature introduced in Innovation Pack 2015. This is also called as Developer Preview designed to gradually migrate from Siebel Tools to Siebel CRM Composer to simplify and expedite the process of configuring Siebel Business Applications.

Topics Include:

• What and Why Siebel Composer – An Overview
• How different is from Traditional Siebel Tools
• Setting Up and Accessing Siebel Composer
• Migrating Web Templates to Manifest5. Test Cases for Siebel Composer

Schedule:

• Thursday , July 16, 2015 08:00 AM (US Pacific Time)
• Thursday , July 16, 2015 11:00 AM (US Eastern Time)
• Thursday , July 16, 2015 05:00 PM (Central European Time)
• Thursday , July 16, 2015 08:30 PM (India Standard Time)

– Jeroen

Follow this link for more details, it lists upcoming Webcasts:

Siebel Advisor Webcast Schedule and Archived Recordings (Doc ID 1456246.1)

Abstract:

This one hour session recommended for technical users to know overview of setup steps for Siebel SSO integration with OAM 11g.

Topics Include:

• Siebel SSO Architecture
• Supported OAM Servers and Webgate details with Siebel
• Installing/configuring OAM 11g Servers
• Installing OAM Webgate for Siebel web server
• Registering Siebel Web Servers with OAM server
• Updating SSO Parameters at Siebel side
• Validating Siebel SSO with OAM 11g integration
• Issues and Troubleshooting

Schedule:

• Thursday , August 27, 2015 08:00 AM (US Pacific Time)
• Thursday , August 27, 2015 11:00 AM (US Eastern Time)
• Thursday , August 27, 2015 05:00 PM (Central European Time)
• Thursday , August 27, 2015 08:30 PM (India Standard Time)

– Jeroen

Oracle has been delivering Siebel Innovation Packs at a steady pace over the past years. At the same pace future directions are being published. Today a milestone date, July 27th. Statement of Direction for Innovation Pack 2016 has arrived at My Oracle Support!

What are the key ingredients to make Innovation Pack the perfect meal?

Before that, remember that this information is intended to outline the general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

The Statement of Direction is written around three themes:

1. Business Agility
2. Customer Experience
3. Industry Innovation

Business Agility

Next Generation Installer

With Siebel 8.1.1.8 we saw the introduction of the Oracle Universal Installer for Siebel. The Oracle Universal Installer – which shares its TLA with another favorite feature of Siebel – has with the arrival of Siebel Innovation Pack 2015 Patchset 1 replaced the oPatch installer for patch sets. I personally always found it a bit awkward having to install a patch with such a low-level tool as oPatch. Anyways, OUI is Oracle’s default tool for software installation across platforms, and is a product on its own. With IP16 an improved OUI release will ship with Siebel. It should make life again a bit easier on different fronts such as silent installation, consistency checks after installation, rollbacks scenarios and such.

WebSocket-based framework

Well, this is a truly important feature! As you should be aware by now, the NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) will be history soon. Google will for Chrome sunset the NPAPI in September 2015 already. Mozilla will not wait much longer. The default browser for Windows 10 was never developed to support NPAPI support. And maybe after the hack of this century, things will further accelerate…

Why is this NPAPI so important? Well – it has been the vehicle for Java applets which are used here and there in Siebel. For example inline-editing relies on Java and so does CTI hotelling. With IP16 a WebSocket-based integration framework will be released to close this gap under the name Desktop Integration Siebel Agent (DISA). Websocket has been designed to allow low-latency communications between a browser and server instead of the traditional chatty http protocol. Typically you’d interact with a server, but DISA will actually be a WebSocket server application, implemented as a local application running at the desktop.

It will enable a number of features, to name some…

1. Outlook Drag n Drop (yeah!)
2. Inline attachment editing (yeah!)
3. Read & Write files on the local machine (wow! but… is that not a huge vulnerability…?)
4. CTI Hotelling
5. Email integration (F9 – Send Email) with external mail agents such as Outlook and Lotus Notes

For now, let’s assume that DISA will be an open and documented framework for customers to leverage too ;-)

Siebel Application Usage Pattern Capture

The SOD states “This feature provides more tools to the IT department to track and analyze the usage patterns of their production systems“. Hey, you might say. That feature has been in Siebel for ages, although since Siebel 8.1 it has not been documented anymore (hence, de-supported). It has been know as Siebel Usage Collection. But then, Usage Collection was just not more that collecting view navigations, and writing it to a file. Nothing special about that at all. You’d customize it yourself in less than a day (and probable more feature-rich). Well, that is what I’ve done in the past to gather usage statistics, fed to a data warehouse to get extremely useful insights such as what are the patterns my most efficient call center reps exhibit?

Still, my strong belief is that for true usage collection one should evaluate Real User Experience Insight. Given, not a free tool. But it provides amazing capabilities. Non-intrusive, allowing for session-replay to support help desk staff and much, much more.

Siebel Composer Developer Preview

Apparently, Innovation Pack 2016 is an Innovation Pack too early. Siebel Composer is still titled as preview. Understandably, the move from Siebel Tools to Siebel Composer is a huge undertaking, which cannot be taken lightly. One of the enhancements for the Innovation Pack 2016 release of the Siebel Composer says it all:

Ease of configuration via a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) visual interface, which is eventually expected to completely replace Siebel Tools

But then, looking at the list of features for CRM Composer, it moves towards enterprise-ready. Important aspects (and probable a real improvement from today’s parallel development capabilities provided by Siebel Tools Object Tagging):

Multi-user development model for Siebel CRM metadata, with support for collaborative and parallel development. Changes are maintained on a user-by-user basis, ensuring that users can make simultaneous configuration changes to the application even if they are modifying the same set of metadata objects.

And since with Siebel Composer we no longer work with the traditional Siebel Developer Web Client, the principle of sandboxing will be introduced so that developers can test their own changes in an isolated fashion. They might get their own Object Manager instance?

Standards-Based REST Interface

Another topic, where Oracle needed to provide an alternative after it de-supported the SAI (Siebel Application Integration) framework. Siebel will natively support REST API services. Isn’t that great? So building an application on top of Siebel will become far less complicated. In the API-economy of today, REST services provided by Siebel are an important step forward.

Unified Cache Manager

Ever heard of Coherence? It’s one of these other Oracle Technology flagship products. Very much a tech product. It’s reason for existence is offloading traffic to the application or database tier, if requests can be fulfilled from a coherent and consistent cache. What the exact use cases are for the Unified Cache Manager? Requires some more time to digest this subject and discuss it. One this is quite sure, Coherence will be optional and separately licensed.

But what will you “cache” in Coherence? A typical use-case would be support for type-ahead (auto-completion) of certain data. Think of accounts, addresses, products, …

Moving to the next theme…

Customer Experience

High Interactivity / Standard Interactivity De-Support

Nothing really new, but the fact that the Open UI client will be the remaining client Oracle will support for Siebel. HI, SI and SI+ will be de-supported. Whether they will be technically redrawn from the product is not said.

Expose Siebel Calendar as CalDAV Server

Yet another highly interesting topic. Oracle Siebel development has taken up the glove to make the Siebel Calendar behave from a functional perspective like any other calendering system. Be it Outlook, Lotus Notes, GMail, Thunderbird or what have you more. The Siebel calendar has never been very feature-rich. Limitations such as recurrence support (e.g. bi-weekly on a Thursday for 20 occurrences to come or until 1st of December 2015) and the ability to support accept/reject/tentative for invitees to name a few. You can safely call this a major overhaul of the Siebel calendar. But with the great benefit that at the same time: the Siebel Calendar can be exposed as a full CalDAV compliant server! That means that you can expose the Siebel Calendar in a another client-application, but it also opens the door for a standards-based synchronization between Siebel and Exchange, Notes or other Collaboration suites out there. As long as they support CalDAV too. Important improvement, if you ask me!

Siebel Mobile 2.0

The App stores will provide a 2.0 version of the Siebel Mobile application. SOD talks about an assisting tool to convert Siebel server-side side eScript to Siebel OUI API scripts for mobile offline use. Well, honestly I have no strong belief in such tools. But let’s first see, before judge.

What is important, is that Siebel Mobile will be available for the Android platform too, with the same functional footprint as the iOS app. Basically this means that the Mobile App, which really is nothing more than an Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) container running Siebel against an Oracle SQLite database. The MAF has access to device-native features such as GPS and camera, as well as using the local file system on the device.

And, important too. Siebel Sales will be delivered too for offline use. Today, Disconnected Mobile supports only the Service and Pharma application. Technically the disconnected platform could support any application if you ask me. But disconnected mobile applications come standard with pre-seeded extraction filters, and offline process automation & device integration.

Siebel Remote

And this will be an eye-opener. Siebel Remote will continue to be available, regardless of what has been previously announced. Siebel Remote will use the Oracle Database XE instead of the traditional SQL Anywhere database. And as you might understand, this is a strategic choice for Oracle, since with the acquisition of Sybase by SAP in the past… Well… you understand who Oracle has to pay in order to allow use of SQL Anywhere ;-)

Simplified Search

First of all the Siebel Search will have an improved UI presentation with a dockable search applet, like we knew it in IP13. An other interesting feature would be “Autocomplete suggestions” (Google-style), which if you ask me would be supported under the hood by the Unified Coherence Caching feature… Also other search engines than Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search will be allowed through an improved API. Or would the Unified Coherence Cache be the new search engine…?

I will close with the third and final topic of the SOD…

Industry Innovations

Which I will just list here…

• Mobile Promotion Enhancements
• In-Memory Promotion Upgrade UI
• Accelerated Decision Making via Enhanced Productivity
• Subject Transfer
• Satellite Site
• Enhancements Driven by Life Sciences Audit and Compliance
• Product Offer Enhancements
• Siebel Public Sector eService integration with Oracle Policy Automation (OPA)
• Messaging Plan Personalization and Call Planning
• Content follow-up for eDetailing
• Application capture with OPA integration
• Siebel CRM – OPA Integration Enhancements
• Self-Service Scheduling
• PDF / Excel Template Support for Siebel Business Intelligence Publisher Reports

Enjoy the further reading!

– Jeroen

The team at Anandtech.com have produced a nice & updated comparison between the Edge browser which comes with Windows 10 and the usual suspects, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. Using the most common benchmarks. While I personally have little trust in Sunspider for obvious reasons from the past, apparently Edge performs particularly well according to Octane 2.0 too.

It will definitely take a while before enterprise customers will move to Windows 10. The good thing is that Windows 10 will ship with Internet Explorer as well as the Edge browser.

Although Edge is brand-new, according to the HTML5Test it is still quite a bit behind on the competition. So less innovation than expected? This requires digging into a bit deeper at a later moment.

Anyways, eager to upgrade my Windows 8.1 laptop to 10 in the coming days :-)

– Jeroen

Windows 10, exciting enough? The atmosphere around Windows 10 is quite positive if you read the many articles which have been written. So, yesterday I took up the glove and downloaded the Windows 10 .iso file and today I created my first Windows 10 Virtual Box image. Without any pain, smoother than you can imagine. Click, click, click, done!

After having played around a bit, I decided to copy my Demo Quick Start environment across. That is the local dedicated client environment I often use, when I do not need a beefed-up server virtual machine.

Of course, there was one major reason for doing this: taking Edge to the test. My Demo Quick Start environment was functional without any pain. Well, that means for Internet Explorer it was working immediately! Since Edge is the default browser, I reckoned removing the /b (browser) switch should be enough to launch Siebel using the Edge browser. Wrong.

Luckily Richard from the SiebelHub faced the same issue. And the simple workaround would be to open Siebel in either Internet Explorer (or Chrome), then launch Edge and copy/paste the Siebel URL in that browser. Et voilá, works like a charm (as workaround then). Do not close the other browser, otherwise the Siebel client will be closed too.

Next I installed Chrome as well on the virtual machine, and was ready to run my usual performance benchmark test. Expectations are high, because while browsing with Edge some web sites it seems to behave pretty well. Added to this those recent positive benchmarks for Edge.

My joy changed into disappointment quickly. In this test Edge did not outperform even its neighbor. Really, it just behaving very similar to Internet Explorer. That means sluggish. Alright, back to Chrome. Immediately you get that feel of ‘souplesse’ back. Could it be Edge is so sluggish because it has Internet Explorer running in the background? Or does Virtual Box has a dramatic influence? Definitely it requires some more testing, but initial signs are not favoring Edge. Unfortunately.

– Jeroen

For those waiting, on the close of the month the Oracle Siebel development team released the combined patch set for Innovation Packs 2014 & 2015. Since code lines between IP14 and IP15 are in-sync and the applications primarily differ one and another from a repository and seed-data perspective, Oracle is able to deliver a combined patch set. Way more effective, way more efficient to develop, build, test and release. And with higher quality on top.

That said, customers coming from a prior release (IP13 or lower…) and considering to migrate should never (and I really mean never) think it’s alright migrating to anything less than Innovation Pack 2015. The traditional consideration we do not want to be the first to guinea pig a release and hence we stick with the n-1 approach is easily countered by the shared code line argument. Sure, if you uptake a new feature not available in Innovation Pack 2014 (e.g. adopting the Synergy theme for example) you could be the one spotting an early issue. But largely any framework related defects and fixes (e.g. within the object manager, industry specific features, the Open UI framework, you name it) will apply to both releases.

This link brings you to the right spot on MOS.

To sum up some of the release fixes:

1. Performance fix which reduces logon time (taking out redundancies, nice)
2. Support for MS SQL Server 2014 has been introduced
3. Quite a number of test automation attribute fixes (the RN/RT/UN attributes which are included in the DOM once you append SWECmd=AutoOn to the URL)
4. Fix for the Cancel Query Timeout popup
5. Fixing GetProfileAttr() calls from traditional browser script (which anyways should better be migrated to OUI API scripts…)
6. “Tripple Click” issue in list applets for check boxes (yes, this definitely is a nice one and many users will love it)
7. Using “Shift” + Arrow keys to select records
8. Message Broadcasting not to reset time-out counter while polling the server (this is an interesting one, since traditionally in HI the Message Broadcasting feature would prevent a session time-out. This can be a pain in the neck, and now this issue has after many years been addressed and hence ceases to exists. Something to beware of)

– Jeroen

Found that Siebel Open UI login performance has been sluggish compared to high interactivity? Just apply Patch Set 14.8/15.2. Login performance has been dramatically improved. Well done!

– Jeroen

White-listing what?

In my recent post discussing the merits of Innovation Pack 15.2 / 14.8 I pointed out the new feature which would allow sessions to time-out regardless whether the message bar functionality is enabled or not. Traditionally when enabling the message bar in Siebel, a Siebel session would hardly time-out (depending whether the SessionTimeout value in the eapps.cfg would exceed the value of the object manager’s MessageBarUpdateInterval parameter. This latter scenario is typically the case.

Further, the High Interactivity client would gracefully close a Siebel session either if the user would explicitly log-out or use the infamous browser’s ‘X’ button. Important, because otherwise the message bar polling would keep the session alive.

However… with Open UI we have absolutely no means to capture the ‘X’ event. Period. That means, if you’d enable the message bar functionality (or rather “Notifications” as we call them in Open UI, because the message bar as such has gone) and a user would hit ‘X’ the Siebel session would remain a living thing. Killing those orphaned sessions would be an administrator job. Ugly.

So with patch set IP15.2/14.8 an important feature got introduced:

Siebel Session Time-Out Application Method White-listing

A feature with a generic nature, configurable through the eapps.cfg. White-listing as such that certain configured application methods would not reset the time-out counter.

Just add this parameter to your eapps.cfg in the [defaults] section, or override if you like on a specific virtual directory instead:

SessionTimeoutWLMethod = UpdatePrefMsg

The value could be a  comma-separated list, to allow other (future) methods as well to be white-listed. If you ask me, quite an important feature. Why? Because with the introduction of the appealing “Notifications” feature in Open UI, the inherent problem allows orphaned sessions on the Siebel Servers easily to start piling up ridiculously fast. Train the users to log-out? You can try. But when was the last time you logged-out of any web application…? User’s are simply not doing this, how hard you try to train & explain.

– Jeroen

PS: I’m on holidays starting today – so I will be offline :-)

Back from holidays, and happy to share that the 15.3/14.9 Patch Set nicely met the August deadline. Below the direct links to the patches. As explained these are technically identical. Although still separate downloads. Reason is that for example the IP15.1 Patch Set got packaged with (the large) dbsrvr files… And since Patch Sets are cumulative, this is something which drags along the release. Therefore the sheer size of the patch set for IP15 versus IP14.

IP2015 PatchSet3 15.1[23048]_PATCHSET3 = 21678618
IP2014 PatchSet9 8.1.1.14[23044]_PATCHSET9 = 21670495
IP2014 PatchSet9 8.2.2.14[23044]_PATCHSET9 = 1670510

And yes, unfortunately, tools keeps still crashing while editing eScripts as confirmed by Jason.

– Jeroen

This result deserves truly a big applause. Oracle development worked closely together with Microsoft engineers to boost Open UI performance. With IP15.3/14.9 a complete overhaul of the List Applet renderer has been delivered. This went into the release quite silent, with no notice in the patch set’s release notes. The improvements were focused to give a boost for Internet Explorer, but the improvement is evident for Chrome (hence other browsers, including Edge) too!

Without more wording, just have a look at the results! These results are just amazing. We can safely say that Open UI will come close or exceed what you have ever experienced with High Interactivity clients. Think of the improvement it will make on mobile deployments for tablets… Skyrocketing performance.

– Jeroen

I got some remarks lately on “how” I benchmark the different Siebel patch sets which I discuss now and then against the usual suspects (IE, Chrome and Firefox). Let me first point back to this old post, from a bit more than a year back. I crafted together with Duncan Ford a small framework which measures the milliseconds spend by the browser between the preload and the postload event. This framework actually made it into the must-read Oracle Siebel Open UI Developer’s Handbook. The time spend between these two events informs me about the number of milliseconds the browser needed to process the DOM and all the triggered events. And with Open UI quite a bit happens to process the ‘raw’ DOM delivered by the Siebel Web Engine to be able to finally display it.

Next I created a set of four progressively complex views, which are based of a dramatically simple virtual business component. The VBC approach makes it extremely simple to port this framework in other environment, when needed. These four views are built per below specifications where I stress that these views not necessarily are representative ;-) The complexity of view 3 & 4 definitely are out of the ordinary. They are primarily meant to identify any kind of ‘hockey-stick’ behavior in performance degradation (call it stress-testing).

View 1 (indicative: 40 controls in total)

• One Form applet with 20 controls
• One List applet with 20 list controls

View 2 (indicative: 240 controls in total)

• One Form applet with 20 controls
• One Form applet with 100 controls
• One List applet with 20 list controls
• One List applet with 100 list controls

View 3 (indicative: 440 controls in total)

• One Form applet with 20 controls
• Two Form applet with 100 controls
• One List applet with 20 list controls
• Two List applet with 100 list controls

View 4 (indicative: 640 controls in total)

• One Form applet with 20 controls
• Three Form applet with 100 controls
• One List applet with 20 list controls
• Three List applet with 100 list controls

When I run my tests, I make sure my laptop is completely offloaded and running at 0-5% CPU. Running the good-old Siebel Dedicated Client is fit-for-purpose to test the views 1 thru 4 in a variety of browsers. First I do a ‘warm-up’ cycle touching all views. Next I take the measurements at least three times, and if the standard deviation between these measurements is too high I re-run the test. Et voilá. That’s it – no rocket science – but an apples & apples comparison.

Below a graph focused on IE11 which just compares IP15.1 (June) with IP15.3 (August) to demonstrate the terrific improvement. Yes, even IE can perform (though still lacking its competition, but anyways).

Click for interactive chart

– Jeroen