It's life Jim, but not as we know it

This is a little embarrassing really - because there is nothing that you need to do to get Siebel running on the Android device. Just fire up your browser.... That's the beauty of using standards. It's taken a while for me to showcase this (OK - a year...) - but I took some time out this afternoon to record the "out-of-the-box" experience. Just fire up an instance of Siebel Sales (Wireless) and point the browser on the Android device to the URL. No problems whatsoever, as you can see on the video below.

Clearly there's some work to be done to make use of the real estate (the out of the box app is styled on windows mobile devices... but it's just standard web stuff and CSS)

OK - Android this week. Palm Pre and iPhone 3 next week. So many great gadgets to choose from!! Don't you just love competition?

Question:

How do you build a Touch screen application, on a device with no keyboard, for someone who has limited sight or just cannot look at the screen (they are driving) ?

I was fortunate enough to attend Google IO last week. (each year it just gets better and better - if you missed it - put it on your calendar for next year). Amongst some of the great sessions I attended was one that deals with two of my most favourite subjects - user interaction and voice technology. Presented by TV Raman and Charles L. Chen - they discuss the Eyes-Free Project : a project that aims to enable fluent eyes-free use of mobile devices running Android. Target uses range from eyes-busy environments like in-car use to users who can't or don't want to look at the visual display. When you watch the video you will see some of the UI innovations for taking advantage of the touch screen without needing to actually look at the screen.

You can download the applications to your Android phone. It's great to see such innovation around user interactivity - especially on a mobile device. The mobile device has the ability to sense more about it's environment than your PC can - so go ahead, watch the video and really make the most of these great new computing platforms.
Download the presentation here

In this presentation, recorded at QCon San Francisco, ThoughtWorks' Ian Robinson explains how a RESTful HTTP approach can be applied in an Enterprise project. He makes use of many of the techniques that make HTTP a powerful protocol, including caching, hypermedia, and the use of standard formats such as Atom Syndication for event notification.

QCon Webcast Located here

This is a really good presentation looking at the various use cases and things to consider when building an Enterprise Application using REST. Well worth 58 minutes of your time.

Great news for all you folks out there that want all the great stuff that's in the latest version of Siebel CRM so badly that the thought of sitting and installing the software drives you mad with anticpation - you can now download the latest version of Siebel as an Oracle VM image. The Siebel 8.0 image is no longer available for download.

Using this virtualized product, You can have your entire Siebel 8.1.1 instance up and running within a few hours of download. There are many well documented financial savings and environmental benefits to be gained from running your applications in a virtualised environment (I've posted a high level already on this blog).

To get the VM image - go here http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux (not the application section).

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, download today, start saving money and saving the planet.

Have fun!

We were at the Google Campfire One event yesterday for the launch of several major developments that bring the Cloud closer to Enterprise Applications in a secure and open standards manner.

The video shows Mark Woollen, VP Social CRM Applications, demonstrating how Google Gadgets and Google Applications running on a private Google site provisioned for an Enterprise customer (but hosted by Google) can access on premise CRM services and data (or any other data from other Oracle Applications for that matter) in a manner that IT can be comfortable with. The open source Google Secure Data Connector sits behind the firewall and allows traffic from the Google site domain to access information from the CRM application. Authentication is done through OAuth.

This is an exciting development because it helps developers deliver new applications and gadgets in the cloud that can co-exist seamlessly with traditional behind the firewall enterprise applications and data. The solution makes use of the new REST API's currently in development for Siebel. The REST API's are being built in a versionless manner - so any Siebel version or vertical solution can take advantage of the cloud. [In Beta, see bottom of post for contacts]

Perhaps the other major announcement is the availability of the Google Java App Engine.

Imagine that you have built a great application running on Oracle Weblogic Server and you want to now deliver some subset of that capability to a third party organisation such as a business partner. Google and Oracle are champions of standardisation. By following standards it is now possible to take your Oracle Weblogic application and run it on the Google AppEngine. It is now possible to build Java applications on the AppEngine and have them work with Siebel - either through the REST API's or even the Siebel Java Data Bean. You old timers will recall the Siebel Java Wizard. Well it's time to take that for a spin and see what cool cloud apps you can build to work with Siebel. Remember - you get all the benefits of hosting (no set up, no hardware, no initial startup cost) but without the drawbacks of proprietary, walled-garden SaaS platforms. It's great news for developers, great news for open standards and brilliant news for customers. So what are you waiting for? Head over to http://code.google.com/appengine/ and get started today!

For details contact Mark Woollen, Mandeep Bhullar or Dipock Das.

Good news folks!! The Microsoft Oracle Center of Excellence is extending their open Invitation for you to attend a FREE SQL Server Performance Workshop for Siebel, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft!.

If you are in or around any of these locations on these dates - be sure to sign up for the workshop [Contact Frank McBath]

The Microsoft Oracle Center of Excellence will be hosting a SQL Server Performance Workshops at the following locations:

This workshop is free to all customers.

The content focuses on how to run a high performance SQL Server environment with Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards.
Workshop Content
There are many classes that cover SQL Server. There are also just as many that cover Oracle Applications… but very few cover the intersection of the two.

This two day workshop covers the specifics of how the Oracle application interacts with SQL Server and how to architect a scalable and highly available solution. Its focus starts at the ODBC level and goes down to the disk.
Emphasis is on isolating issues, finding problems before they happen, and performance tuning. The goal of the workshop is to move beyond “my system’s slow” into WHY it’s slow and how to fix it. We’ll cover: what to look at, what it means, and what “good” & “bad” look like on a wide variety of platforms.
While the workshop is in lecture format, real world examples are used exclusively in the form of perfmon and profiler traces in addition to numerous trip reports and health checks that have been done with customers over the last 5 years. We’ll use out of the box tools and basic scripts to gather up information and apply common sense techniques to come up with answers.
Skills learned in this workshop can also be applied to other enterprise applications in your landscape.
Target Audience: DBAs, Siebel/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards Administrators, Consultants

Topics Covered

• Top Reasons for SQL Server 2005/2008
• Query Repro: Reproducing Problem Queries Outside of the Application and Tools to Fix Them
• Performance Tuning Methodology: A Repeatable Process
• Hands on Performance Tuning Lab
• Databases & Disk Drives: Architecting a Scalable Solution
• SQL Server Settings
• Case Study Handouts
• Architecting for RSCI
• SQL Server Compression
• Hyper-V and Virtualization

Location & Registration
The workshop will be held at the Microsoft offices in Japan and the US.
To register for the event, please email Frank McBath.
Additional details are available by contacting Frank McBath (frankmcb@microsoft.com), MOCE Global Database Evangelist.
For a complete list of all workshops in Japan & United States locations, abstract, workshop & lab content, and logistics, please click on the following link for our newsletter: MOCE Events 2009 Q2

To Register for the event, contact Frank McBath Frank McBath

Here is my Openworld 2008 presentation. The session does not talk about the features of specific Social CRM applications - but seeks to educate the audience as to why social media is critical to their business and to understand some of the aspects of social media that drives aggressive end user consumption.

A while ago I came across a brilliant web cast by Steve Souders (he subsequently wrote a book, that I bought and I recommend that you buy as well ...: here).
Here's another brilliant web cast by Douglas Crockford talking about AJAX Performance.

Now creating animations to explain a concept. role or product - is so simple! It took about 40 minutes to create the animation below.....

GoAnimate.com: RESTful webservices ...


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

[First posted on wiki.oracle.com June 2008]

Oracle CRM OnDemand has a great feature that allows you to set up a workflow process that will detect an Event and associate a series of Actions for that event.
We're going to take one of those actions, send an email, and publish a message out to our Twitter account. All without writing a line of code....

There may be several reasons why you want to do this:

a) you want an alert when someone changes some data that you are interested in
b) the alert has not been set up by your dev or IT folks - and you don't do code
c) you want your friends (well sales team and work colleagues) to know about the changes as well
d) you use Twitter today ...

Of course, you have to be careful about the data that you are publishing.
It is still Enterprise data - subject to the same data privacy laws that is exercised today on your CRM data. But with a bit of common sense - you can get much value from Twitter without exposing data that should remain private (even if the data is public - there may be restrictions on the disclosure of that information)

Use case: you are going to set up a rule that will publish any change to a contact's job title to your Twitter feed. (Should anyone you know get promoted - you can give them a call and congratulate them...). Of course - this assumes that someone else in your network has updated the system based on knowledge that they have discovered. (Or you could have an intergration to LinkedIn or another professional social network).

Step 1: Set up your workflow to create an email

This is straight forward - if you have never done it before it will take about 5 minutes.
We will create a workflow that gets triggered whenever one of our contacts changes job title - either they got promoted or changed jobs - and someone else has updated the job title ...

part i) Set up a workflow to generate an event whenever someone changes a JobTitle.

From the Main CRM On Demand screen - Select 'Admin' then 'Administer Workflow Rules'
Create the new Workflow with the following settings

Workflow Name: JobTitleEventFeed
Record Type: Contact
Active : (set as active)
Trigger Event: When modified record is saved
Workflow Rule Condition: (PRE('') <> [])

Quite simply - whenever a modified record is saved, and the Job Title has changed - then fire off the action.

part ii) Set up an Action to be triggered whene the workflow conditions are met

Once you have created the workflow - you need to create an action (any number of actions). We will use the 'Send Email action'.
Create a new action. Set the following properties.

Action Name: Send to Blogger
To: Valid Email Address
Set the email address as to a unique mail-to-blogger address e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com.
Subject: %%%[]%%% has changed Job title
Message body : %%%[]%%% of %%%[]%%% has changed jobs from %%%PRE('')%%% to %%%[]%%%

(If you had not figured out by now - %%%[]%%% is a way of saying 'replace this string with the ContactFullName value.)

Make sure the Action and the Workflows are Active

Step 2 - set up your blogger account
We are going to create a blogger account where we can send the email.

a) create a blogger account - e.g. http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com
b) set up your 'mail-to-blogger' address (go to Settings -> Email) - e.g. myusername123.twitterfeed@blogger.com. You will use the 'mail-to-blogger' address defined in Step 1.
c) Make a note of the RSS feed URL. In this example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml. You will use this in Step 3

Step 3 - set up your twitterfeed account
d) go to twitterfeed.com and associate the feed URL to your twitterfeed account. In ths example it will be http://mycrmupdates123.blogspot.com/rss.xml

All you need now is a good Twitter client (I use Twirl an AIR desktop gadget - which means it works on Windows, Linux and Mac).

So - go ahead - change a contact's title ... - it will get published to your Twitter account... (twitterfeed has a lag of up to 30 minutes)

There may be a more efficient way of doing this - I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has a better way ...

Just over a year ago we created Siebel on Oracle VM. It was quite amazing feat - we had just announced Oracle VM at Openworld and we thought it would be beneficial to offer Siebel in a Virtualised form. I had a chat with Richard Exley from the High Availability Architecture Team and "Siebel to Go" was born. The task - "to have Siebel in a form that could be downloaded ready to run within an hour". Richard built the solution (in his garage...) and it was tested by Uma Welingkar (who stripped down a number of machines she found in the office, to create a networked virtualised environment). {Note: we don't normally build software this way]

Siebel on Oracle VM was released last year at LinuxWorld.

If you want to know why we did it - here is the really short slide deck I created when when we pulled the covers off the solution. Don't expect any technology slides. It's all about the business benefits.... you should read it as it focuses on Green computing more that the tech.

I have never have I seen so much hysteria as that which surrounds the subject of Flash and it's support for Accessibility. This week I received an email recommending that we drop our use of Adobe Flash/AIR (we use it in our gadgets). (It was not a customer). The basis of the recommendation came from the results of a survey that can be found here. The survey itself is very good - but is not controlled (i.e. 1000 users were asked about their experiences).

My response to the team was quite simple: Accessibility is not a feature of the tooling - it's what you have to, as a responsible developer (and by that I mean anyone involved in the production of software) consider when designing, writing, testing your application. If you don't design the UI to cater for the needs of different individuals - then there is nothing that Flex/AIR/ADF/JSF/AJAX can do to improve that. Likewise, it is not the function of one department to add Accessibility to your product either.

Andrew Kirkpatrick of Adobe has posted a brilliant write up on the use of Flash and Accessibility. I recommend that you read it, especially when the next person starts pressing the alarm bells over the use of Flash.

Andrew's blog can be found here: WebAIM Screen Reader Survey: A closer looks at Flash and PDF results

As you are probably aware, we have been working on a number of Flex based projects at Oracle. The deliverables so far have ranged from desktop gadgets to full fledged applications such as the Social CRM Applications and Oracle Metalink. Each day we hear from customers who are also building Enterprise applications with Flex - and using the best of Siebel (data, process, metadata) but exposing it through Flex or AIR. As the developments get more and more advanced, and larger in project size/scope, development teams are finding that there needs to be a more formalised approach to the application development and code structure.

Fortunately, there is a solution that may help you. Anvil is an Open Source project that was built to help make Enterprise Flex development easier. (It also provides a portal environment for running Flex applications).

In this video, Anvil project founder Ryan Knight, shares details about the problems Anvil solves, and the projects long-term goals. Ryan and James Ward (co-founder) also discuss some of the challenges of building applications with the Flex framework.

Whether you are using Flex or not - this is a brilliant video to watch as it discusses some of the darker sides of application development that seldom get considered when folks talk about technology or middleware. Most of this was hidden from the Siebel developer/customer but needs consideration when using Siebel with an alternative user interface - be it Flex, ADF or .NET.

If you are lucky enough to live in any one of these locations - or even fortunate enough to be in the following locations on these dates, the Microsoft Oracle Center of Excellence is running a series of Free SQL Server Perofrmance workshops for Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards. (Of course if your customer is in this location and running their application on SQL Server - please encourage them to sign up for the workshop).

Locations and Dates
January 21 & 22 Zurich
January 26 & 27 Estonia
January 29 & 30 Stockholm
February 4 & 5 New York City
February 17 & 18 Los Angeles
February 25 & 26 San Francisco

The Agenda covers
Top Reasons for SQL Server 2005/2008
Query Repro: Reproducing Problem Queries Outside of the Application and Tools to Fix Them
Performance Tuning Methodology: A Repeatable Process
Hands on Performance Tuning Lab
Tools & Techniques
Databases & Disk Drives: Architecting a Scalable Solution
SQL Server Settings
Case Study Handouts
Architecting for RSCI
SQL Server Compression
Hyper-V and Virtualization

For more information contact :
Frank McBath frankmcb@microsoft.com
Sue Meyer v-sumeye@microsoft.com (send Registration requests to Sue).

You can now download the Oracle Gadgets for CRM Sales from the Oracle eDelivery site.

You can find out more about the gadgets
here: Gadget Installation Guide and here: Gadget User Guide

Have fun!