working with technology

A few days ago, a friend complaint that he could no understand some word when he spoke with the customer, cause this customer is a Siebel user and use some kind of  'siebel language' that he could not understand! and he turn to me for help.

What is Siebel Applications ?

This  question is not so difficult to understand actually. Of cause we all know about the fact that Siebel is a famous CRM(Customer Relationship Management) system that we use to manage our customer, our partners and our own staff and link them together.

That fact that separate Siebel applications from our home-grown software is that Firstly Siebel is an packaged business software. just like any other 'packaged software', Siebel  has the following characteristic:

1. Data model: Siebel comes with the whole data model set (tables) that we could used to describe our customers, supplier, partners and their related activities. When we purchase Siebel software, We have all these data models and we 're supposed to put our own data into this data model  .
2. Applications: Siebel also comes with the whole applications that we could use to manage the underlying data model.  We login into Siebel using browser and mange our information,  We don't  have to  hire programmer to write code for Siebel cause all the code is there and ready to use.
3. Configuration: The very big difference that separate 'packaged software' from home-grown software is the ability to customize the software for your own situation cause every industry and enterprise has its own characteristic and 'packaged software' must be configurable(customizable)  for each individual enterprise.

In order to be configurable , each 'packaged software' must construct a set of concepts and customer could use these concepts to tailor the 'packaged software' to his own requirement. These concepts might be different for each software, for example, the well know concept of flexfield for Oracle EBS is a typical scenario!

Siebel Concepts for customization

Siebel also comes with these concept, It is divided into different category.

1. Appearance customization: The easiest and might be mostly required by customers is the ability to configure appearance, for example, company logo, color and font size. It is easy to do this kind of customization using siebel, It is related with the Siebel concept 'Siebel Web Template' or swt for short.

   It is lucky that Siebel has choosed to designe the software interface using the well know design principal 'separate  data from the appearance'. By using the concept of Siebel web template, which is a set of special 'HTML' files for Siebel front end.  We could use any HTML editor to do customization for Siebel web page appearance.  Siebel provide the traditional way for web page customization. for example , We could modify the color, font size by modify the Siebel CSS file.  It is all HTML.

   But there 're some special tags <swe> in these Siebel Web Templates, which is the place holder for back end data. Siebel Web Server Extension (SWE) will interpret these <swe> tags and replace it with the real data at the runtime! While Web Server only return HTML to the client browser!

----to be continued