Siebel Business Service Library - Part 1: Introduction (Updated) After many conversations with fellow Siebel developers, hours

of bookshelf reading, google searches and many late evenings spent with the simulator (this sounds so sad), the idea of providing a list of the most important Siebel business services came to me. Today, I will start by listing my initial selection of preconfigured business services (in SIA 8.1.1) and by asking the astute reader community for help. If you can name a Siebel standard business service and the reason why it should be in the list, please add a comment. So here it is: The list of preconfigured Siebel business services (the "library") which every developer should know (imho): Asynchronous Server Requests Data Validation Manager EAI Data Transformation Engine EAI Dispatch Service EAI File Transport EAI Siebel Adapter EAI XML Converter EAI XML Queuing Service EAI XML Write to File EAI XML Read from File EAI XSLT Service Outbound Communications Manager PRM ANI Utility Service Read CSV File Row Set Transformation Toolkit SIA BC Utility Service SIS OM PMT Service Spell Checker Synchronous Server Requests Unified Messaging Service Universal Inbox Usage Tracking Service Workflow Process Manager Workflow Utilities XML Gateway Additional services added from the comments: FINS Data Transfer Utilities FINS Teller UI Navigation Shopping Service SIS OM PC Service SSSE Address Parser (eScript) TNT SHM Workflow UI Service Some more we came across in the process of collecting input for this series: Web Engine HTTP TXN Many standard business services are widely used by Oracle engineering as revealed by the following query on the S_WFR_STP table which stores the workflow process steps in the Siebel Repository. select count(SERVICE_NAME) Count, SERVICE_NAME 'Business Service' from SIEBEL.S_WFR_STP group by SERVICE_NAME order by count(SERVICE_NAME) desc

Stay tuned for the next part where we will begin to describe each of the business services in the above list. Please remember: if you miss a business service, please use the comments functionality to add it to the list (including a reason why it should be there). have a nice day @lex Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz Labels: BSL, business service, Siebel CRM 4 Kommentare: fkirill said... Well, I doubt that there is a case to touch all those services even during many successful years with Siebel. For example, most of serveces related to queues are useless until there is a task to work with queues. Are there many organizations use that nowadays? Another example, to use Row Set Transformation Toolkit you have to be very confident about Integration Object/Hiararchy manipulations and internal structures. Besides there is a task to initially fill the Hierarchy, which is not a piece of cake for an average developer too. performancewise this is ofcourse a better alternative then script/WF but... Imagine you have such a wonderful implementation in production and smth goes wrong and a process gives you an error. For support you only have average-grade developers for whom it is easier to rewrite it using script then to understand how it works and provide some fix to an issue. Of course I can recognize elegance and beauty of such solutions. But since they are very difficult to support I tend to use them only in extreme conditions (such as extreme performance requirements). For example, EAI Siebel Adapter + VBC is a good combination when you need to look up one or two records in 100-million S_CONTACT table and to present them to user afterwards and you need to do that within 2 or 3 seconds (Call-Center operatior have their KPIs measured in seconds, so system requirements are accordingly strict). But if 10 seconds is still ok from business-users point of view. then I would recommend normal scripting instead of such a beautiful but terrible-to-support solution. Imagine, to make the solution on single view work smooth it took couple of months of the best available developers on market. So you can imagine how expansive this given view is. Was it worth it? Definitely. Would I recommend it as a streamline approach? Definitely NOT! So, I would say that the other (negative) side of using advanced services is cost of production and cost of support/ownership which is often overlooked. November 8, 2010 9:33 PM @lex said... Hi fkirill, many thanks for your thoughtful comment. The idea of discussing these business services came out of the conclusion that using predefined code from Oracle is much easier in both development and support than re-inventing the wheel with eScript. Of course, the average developer will never use all of these business services, but hopefully this blog will be read by more than one developer ;-)

I don't want to go into yet another discussion why scripting is evil. It is a fact that many projects suffer from a heavy burden of too much code which they can no longer manage nor support. I thank you for your comment because it will definitely help me to make the point even more clear and I'll try to underline the importance of understandable and supportable solutions with those standard business services. have a nice day @lex November 9, 2010 8:46 AM Anonymous said... Hi Alex, not main stream but have come in handy in the past: "TNT SHM Workflow UI Service" --> GotoView "FINS Teller UI Navigation"-->RefreshCurrentApplet "SSSE Address Parser (eScript)"-->GetCRLF Regards, Shane November 9, 2010 5:28 PM Rahul said... Hey @lex, Useful Post. Adding few more to the bunch which could be of some help: FINS Data Transfer Utilities -> DataTransfer. Basically it could be an alternative for Update,Insert, Delete instead of EAI siebel adapter service. SIS OM PC Service -> Get Next RowId. This can be used for unique id generation Shopping Service -> GotoView. Primarily used for navigation from one view to other maintaing context. November 10, 2010 7:08 AM