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Planning Upgrades for Global Deployments

This section describes considerations for planning a successful upgrade of Siebel Business Applications within a global deployment.

For detailed information about the upgrade process, see the Upgrade Guide.

Planning for the Upgrade

Addressing the questions in the following list will help you prepare for a successful upgrade of Siebel Business Applications within a global deployment.

• What database version do you use?

  Where applicable, you must upgrade your RDBMS to a supported version for Siebel 7.8. If you are moving to Unicode, the new database version may also make this possible.

• What version of Siebel Business Applications will you be upgrading from? Current versions of Siebel Business Applications support Unicode.
• Do you know what is involved in migrating your data to Unicode?
• Did you previously deploy a customized language not certified by Siebel Systems? Such languages are also referred to as unshipped languages. See also Localizing an Unshipped Language.
• Do you know how to upgrade date-time fields to Universal Time Coordinated (UTC)? See also Deploying with Global Time Zone.
• Are the Siebel Language Packs you require released and available? What Siebel release levels (including patches) are required for implementing these languages?
• Have you upgraded client machines (including keyboards, fonts, locales installed, and localized operating system) to support the new installed languages?
• Have you evaluated the need to upgrade all third-party products to versions that support Unicode, the countries/locales you will be localizing for, and the languages you require?

Results to Expect After Upgrading

After you have addressed the issues above and performed the necessary upgrade tasks, you should have gone through the following conversion processes:

1. Updating databases and Siebel versions to current versions.
2. Converting data to Unicode or to another code page that is supported with the newer versions of Siebel applications. (Conversion to Unicode requires the assistance of Siebel Expert Services.)
3. Converting selected LOVs to MLOVs.
4. Converting selected date-time data to UTC.