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About Siebel Application Services Interfaces

Siebel Application Services Interfaces (ASIs) are prebuilt interfaces to Siebel business processes. These interfaces expose Siebel functionality as services to the application environment, as well as allow Siebel business processes to use services provided by external applications. Siebel ASIs are designed for ease of maintenance and can be configured by an administrator using Web Services Administration screens without requiring in depth knowledge of Siebel EAI.

ASIs provide a release-independent integration interface. The integration interface to the Siebel application remains unchanged with each upgrade to new releases. ASIs are extensible and are accessible as Web Services or through any third-party Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution. These benefits mean easier integration between Siebel application and external systems with significant reduction in integration, maintenance, and upgrade costs.

ASIs are published in a standard metadata format, such as Extensible Markup Language Document Type Definitions (XML DTD) and Web Services Descriptive Language/XML Schemas (WSDL/XSD) and are built using the ASI Framework.

There are two types of ASIs, Inbound ASIs and Outbound ASIs. Inbound ASI is used to accept data into Siebel applications from an external system using Siebel workflow processes, Siebel Business Services, and Siebel Data Synchronization services through the Siebel Object Manager as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Inbound ASIs

An Outbound ASI is used to send data out based on a UI event or a trigger in your Siebel workflow process as illustrated in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Outbound ASIs

NOTE:  For details on ASIs, see Application Services Interface Reference.