Bookshelf v7.5: Planning an Upgrade

Planning an Upgrade

The upgrade to Siebel 7 is an opportunity to use new functionality and optimize your existing Siebel environment.

A successful upgrade planning process consists of the following steps:

Evaluate the complexity of the upgrade. Determine the complexity of the upgrade effort based on Siebel modules implemented, number of integration points, number of interfaces, total number of scripts, and number of user-interface scripts. See Evaluating Upgrade Complexity Based on Customization.

Assess the current Siebel environment. Perform a detailed assessment of the current Siebel environment to determine how the current implementation will be affected by upgrade to Siebel 7 architecture. The assessment will help you to identify areas where you can take advantage of new Siebel functionality to meet business requirements. See Assessing the Current Siebel Environment.

Analyze new product functionality. Analyze the new Siebel product to identify functionality in the new release that may meet business requirements that were not met by functionality in the prior release or that replaces functionality in the prior release. See Analyzing New Functionality.

Estimate the level of effort to upgrade. Determine the level of effort required to upgrade based on the results of your complexity evaluation, current environment assessment, and new functionality review. This will help you to estimate resources, timeline, and costs. See Estimating the Level of Effort to Upgrade.

Establish the upgrade team. Assemble a cross-functional upgrade team that is proficient in the technologies introduced in the latest release of Siebel 7 and understands Siebel architecture and performance best practices. See Establishing the Upgrade Team.

Review interface migration tasks. Determine the effort to migrate modified applets and views (associating applets with Web template items and mapping them to Web template controls), scripts, EIM interfaces, and workflows. See Assessing Interface Migration Tasks.

Plan for upgrade tuning. Tuning your production upgrade scripts can significantly reduce downtime during the final stages of your Siebel 7 upgrade. Examples of upgrade tuning include eliminating SQL statements that do not affect any data, executing long-running SQL statements in parallel, and executing table creation, table rebuilds, and index creation in parallel. See Tuning the Production Upgrade Scripts.

Identify data migration tasks. After completing a development environment upgrade and any necessary reconfiguration and unit testing, you must migrate configuration changes and certain types of data and files from the development environment to your test or production environment. See Identifying Data Migration Tasks.

Provide for end user training. Analyze the impact of change on the end user community and develop a plan for end user training and adoption. See Planning End User Training.

In summary, the upgrade of your Siebel application requires detailed understanding of customizations made to your current deployment, analysis of the components within your enterprise, analysis of how to use new functionality provided by Siebel software, and strict adherence to industry best practices and best practices identified in this guide.

The upgrade planning process will produce a roadmap for the entire upgrade project that outlines infrastructure, deployment, and training requirements.

Use the results of this process to develop a project plan that identifies required skills and resources for developing and deploying the upgraded application. This will help you with advance budgeting of resources, time, and training.

For information and guidance beyond what is provided in this guide, contact your Siebel Global Service Practice Manager.