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Party Model

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Release 7.x introduces the concept of a party table (S_PARTY), in which all persons and organizational units are held. With the new model, Accounts, Organizations, Internal Divisions, Contacts, Employees, Positions, and Households are all considered parties and can be referenced from the same table, S_PARTY.

Most of the tables that housed these data entities still exist and are still used, but they are now extension tables to the new base table. Data is brought into the business components through an implicit join.

Additionally, Release 7.x now uses a single-person table and a single-organization unit table. For example, Employees and Contacts are now combined in the same table (S_CONTACT). Similarly, internal and external Organization Units are now combined in the table (S_ORG_EXT).

The new S_PARTY table is the primary table in the Party or Single-Person model and the base table for all Party business components. Siebel extension tables: S_USER, S_EMPLOYEE, S_CONTACT, S_ORG_EXT, S_POSTN, and S_BU support the Party model. Each non-person party directly or indirectly has person members, such as employees or contacts.

The new Party model has made several tables obsolete. The S_EMPLOYEE table is obsolete as its functionality was merged into the S_CONTACT table. The S_ORG_INT table is obsolete, as its functionality has been merged into S_ORG_EXT. S_EMP_POSTN has been replaced by S_PARTY_PER.

There are several other new tables in the data model supporting the consolidation of S_EMPLOYEE with S_CONTACT and of S_ORG_INT with S_ORG_EXT. The S_USER table stores Siebel User information. The S_EMP_PER stores attributes for Brand-Owner Employees and Partner Users who are considered agents of the Brand-Owner, supporting sales and service activities on behalf of the Brand-Owner. The S_BU table stores Organization information.

As a result of the party model, the tables listed in Table 5 are obsolete in Release 7.x:

Table 5.  Obsolete Tables

Obsolete Tables in Siebel 7
S_EMPLOYEE
S_EMPLOYEE_ATT
S_ORG_INT
S_ORG_INT_ATT
S_POSTN_RPT_REL

Figure 4 depicts the Party changes to the data model that occur during upgrades from Release 6.x to Release 7.x:

Figure 4.  Party Model

Given this new table structure and new business object definitions, it is important to understand how the Release 7.x upgrade works. The following steps occur during the Release 7.x upgrade:

Data Migration to Support Party Model

• Migration of data from S_EMPLOYEE to S_CONTACT, S_USER, S_EMP_PER for standard Siebel columns
• Migration of data from S_ORG_INT to S_ORG_EXT, S_BU for standard Siebel columns
• Creation of the Party table records for each previous contact, position, employee, account, division

Business Component Definitions

• Business component definitions updated to reference S_PARTY as Primary Table (for example, Employee, Contact, Position, Account)
• Standard and Custom joins to S_EMPLOYEE changed to S_CONTACT, S_USER, S_EMP_PER
• Standard and Custom joins to S_ORG_INT changed to S_ORG_EXT
• Implicit joins set for custom fields created on business components that have been retargeted to S_PARTY. For example, if a custom field, Alternate Phone, existed on the Contact business component, the upgrade would initiate the following actions:
  • Contact business component would be retargeted to S_PARTY
  • Join to S_CONTACT from S_PARTY defined on Contact business component
  • Implicit join set for the Alternate Phone field

Additional Considerations

With the Access Control mechanism comes two new visibility mode types, catalog visibility and group visibility. For certain standard Siebel eBusiness Application configurations, the view mode and picklist mode have catalog visibility and only render data visible if the catalogs, categories, and access groups are defined.

One of the considerations during the upgrade will be to move forward with the access control model and carefully plan and prepare the access groups, catalogs, categories as part of the upgrade phase.

Alternatively, if continued use of Multi-Org is desired, changes to default view and picklist configuration must be modified as part of the upgrade.

NOTE:  Make sure data is visible after the production upgrade.

For more details on the Release 7.x data model as it relates to the Party model, please see Siebel eBusiness Data Model Reference. For more information on the new Access Control and Security mechanism in Release 7.x, see Security Guide for Siebel eBusiness Applications.

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