Siebel Open UI: Application Usability or Mobility?
Guest Post by
Shyamalee Samvatsar, Lead Consultant, Infosys Limited
During Oracle Open World 2011, Oracle announced Siebel Open UI, the new paradigm for enabling a standards based, rich and versatile UI for Siebel applications.
Most of us, practicing CRM professionals, would have experienced the typical CRM program lifecycle. With much fanfare and excitement, an organization embarks upon a business transforming CRM program. The CRM application is a key enabler for this program. For a typical, on-premise COTS implementation, most organizations start with the noble intent of leveraging vanilla capabilities. Over time, more and more features and capabilities are implemented, resulting in a highly complex application that is disliked by the end users.
With respect to Siebel, one of the key complaints from end users is the complex UI, too many clicks, non-intuitive etc. We have seen organizations which have eventually abandoned the Siebel OOTB UI and built completely custom UI, a highly time and effort intensive exercise.
The Siebel Open UI should provide an in-house solution to the problems mentioned above by enabling a user interface that is simple, interactive, intuitive, productive and accessible.
Siebel Open UI has the following characteristics:
• Easily extensible open architecture
• Standards Based (HTML 4/5, CSS 2.1/3.0, JavaScript 1.5)
• Supports all modern browsers on PC and mobile
• Easy to deploy and customize
• Optional - can exist with current HI and SI clients
Now that Siebel Open UI will be supported on most modern browsers, a key question is 'Do we need separate mobility solutions to provide anytime/anywhere access to our fieldforce?' The answer to that would depend on the scope of mobile capability enablement needed for the enterprise.
In case the target mobility capabilities are limited to CRM - eg: Field sales person needing access to key customer and opportunity information, it may be achieved through a rich/flexible Siebel Open UI based solution.
However, typically, the scope of enterprise mobility would be beyond CRM. Eg: The same field sales user may need to raise/approve travel requests, work offline, capture expenses, access an internal collaboration platform etc. This may require select capabilities of multiple back end systems to be mobile enabled. In such a case, an enterprise mobility solution, potentially based on an MEAP platform, may be required. Other factors such as native app support, devices range supported are also influencing factors.
With Siebel Open UI, we can possibly see the Industry leading business processes and data model of Siebel being complemented by an equally rich UI that provides a great user experience across the most popular devices. I look forward to experiencing this new paradigm.
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Comments
Does the Siebel Open UI be deployed as a native app in platforms like iOS or Andriod? If yes, how is this done?
Posted by: Baskar G | November 12, 2012 12:04 PM
Baskar yes Open UI will be iOS & Android compatible - uses standards based architecture. Have a seen a demo recently and believe this will breathe new life into UPDATED and UPGRADED Seibel apps.
- Hashim
Posted by: Hashim | November 15, 2012 11:53 AM
I am not sure about your comment "The Siebel Open UI should provide an in-house solution to the problems mentioned above by enabling a user interface that is simple, interactive, intuitive, productive and accessible". Is this new UI a technology change or the basic paradigm of screens around objects is changing. I believe it is former. And that will potentially will not change the UI much without custom programming, which may not be failsafe.
Posted by: Ashok | November 20, 2012 4:02 PM