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
