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About Interfaces for Siebel Application Services

A Siebel Application Services Interface (Siebel ASI) is a prebuilt interface to Siebel business processes. This interface exposes Siebel functionality as services to the Siebel application environment, and allows a Siebel business process to use services provided by an external application. A Siebel ASI provides ease of maintenance and can be configured by an administrator using the Web Services Administration screens which do not require detailed knowledge of Siebel EAI.

Because the integration interface to the Siebel application remains unchanged with each upgrade to a release, the integration interface is independent of a specific release. The interfaces in Siebel ASI are extensible and are accessible as a Web Service or through a third-party Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution. These benefits simplify integration between a Siebel application and an external system, resulting in a significant reduction in the costs associated with integration, maintenance, and upgrades.

An ASI is 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). They are built using the ASI Framework.

For more information, see Siebel Application Services Interface Reference.

Types of ASI Interfaces

An ASI is either an inboud ASI and or an outboud ASI.

Inbound ASI

Figure 2 illustrates how an inbound ASI is used to accept data into a Siebel application from an external system by using Siebel workflow processes, Siebel business services, and Siebel data synchronization services through the Siebel Object Manager.

Figure 2. Inbound ASI

Outbound ASI

Figure 3 illustrates how an Outbound ASI is used to send data that is based on a UI event or a trigger in a Siebel workflow process.

Figure 3. Outbound ASI