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About the Siebel Mobile Connector

The Siebel Mobile Connector allows partners and customers to create voice, wireless, and other applications with Siebel eBusiness content. The Siebel Mobile Connector is a standards-based API that delivers well-formed XML from an optimized Siebel application definition. This gives the calling application a definition of user interface and user data in XML format.

Siebel partner and customer application developers can give mobile users real-time or near real-time access to critical Siebel eBusiness information through a variety of mobile devices. By using speech or a wireless application on a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, users can view, edit and create information in their companies' Siebel eBusiness repository. Siebel data and data from other applications can be combined in the same user interface. For example, employees, partners and customers can:

• Update sales opportunities
• Search for account information
• Access calendar and contact details
• Review order and parts status
• Respond to service requests

The Metadata Business Service allows customers and partners to filter data offered through the pre-configured application definitions without having to use Siebel Tools to permanently change the application configuration. The Siebel Mobile Connector generates style sheets to limit the data returned from an applet. The style sheets are stored as XSL documents on the Siebel Server. The pre-built Siebel Mobile Connector application definition has been optimized for mobile applications. These optimized views are aimed at improving performance on mobile devices. Because the Siebel Mobile Connector handles the details of abstracting the lower-level data model, it may not be necessary for third-party application developers to rewrite their code following an upgrade to Siebel applications. Thus, the upgrade path for applications using the Siebel Mobile Connector becomes relatively independent of the Siebel upgrade path.

If you need to customize the application definition beyond applying style sheets, Siebel Tools can be used. The Siebel Mobile Connector uses the same development toolset (Siebel Tools), and the same logical data model as all other Siebel eBusiness Applications.

Additionally, the Siebel Mobile Connector provides an Alert Business Service to communicate changes to specific business components. Notifications can be pushed to employees, partners or customers who spend a majority of their time outside the office. This business service creates an XML document that can be pushed to customer or partner-developed mobile applications. For example, the reassignment of a service request from one service technician to another triggers a workflow; in this process the Alert Business Service creates an XML document with the relevant, predefined data and sends it to the mobile application, thereby allowing the application to dispatch a wireless message to both parties indicating their reassignment.