Siebel Technology

Siebel is what it is because of the multiple ways in which you can achieve a given task. As I never fail to mention, this can be a boon or a bane depending on the developer carrying out the configuration.

Siebel offers powerful order management capabilities. You will explore the real depth of orders largely in the telecom and media vertical, where there is a lot of CPQ (Configure, price, quote) play.

Logs are a standard way of debugging any software application, and Siebel is no exception. For anyone who have spent more than six months in Siebel, you will know this - although configuration can be done without referring the logs, you become a smart developer only when you see what is going on behind the scenes.

Siebel server scripting provides more than one option to do the same thing. Developers can use different methods available in the object to suit their needs. Often, any initial choice made in hurry, will become the standard for all future scripts.

Sorting in Siebel is not all about specifying the sort criteria at the business component level ( though that works too!). You can also limit to the user to sort based on her own needs ( through the PDQ), or go more granular and enable specific sort specification in specific views.

Named Search Specification is a powerful little feature that is hidden away. It enables you to programmatically set the search specification relation to that cannot be cleared from the UI.

Though it seems improbable because of my questionable love for scripting, there is no love lost for workflows. I’m a big fan of workflows not only because they encourage modularity, are easy to configure and deploy, but also because - they’re really easy to debug.

If you have not used try/catch blocks, don’t be surprised - you do have company. Even to this day and age when Siebel has become a really make sure application over a decade ( without any significant changes for the better part of the decade I might add), there are developers who simply skip this.

Siebel logs provide a whole lot of information to debug application issues. Although invaluable, they fall short in one aspect - scripting. When you have complex eScripts in your application, you’ll find it difficult to write new scripts on top of them as well as debug any of the existing scripts.

Siebel workflows are quite powerful. They provide a good alternative to scripting, And that is a recommendation that you see from most of the designers, and from Oracle. But, can workflows to everything that scripts can do?