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Reasons to Reuse or Not Reuse a Predefined Object

This topic describes reasons to reuse or not reuse predefined object.

Reasons to Avoid Extensive Customization of Siebel CRM

Customization is the act of performing significant modifications to the predefined product, such as making the following modifications:

• Creating new modules that do not exist in the predefined Siebel application. This work typically involves configuring the database, and creating many new business components and business objects.
• Modifying a significant number of predefined objects.
• Making significant modifications to predefined behavior, such as visibility.
• Making significant modifications to framework objects, such as JavaScript files.
• Writing a significant amount of custom scripts.

Inappropriate customization of Siebel CRM can cause the following problems:

• Decreased maintainability.
• Increased cost of ownership.
• Potential for decreased performance. A predefined Siebel application is tuned for performance.
• Potential affect on future upgrades.
• Increased testing effort.
• Inconsistent application behavior.

Why Reusing Objects Is Important

Reuse involves building components that you can reuse and configure. Reuse allows you to limit the amount of customization in your deployment. Any modifications that you make to the predefined configuration must maximize reuse and allow for easy customization. Several ways exist to reuse components in Siebel CRM. For example:

• Use predefined configuration objects. For example, business components, business objects, links, applets, views, and so on.
• Use Siebel declarative configurations and tools to translate business requirements into application behavior. For example, Siebel Tools, Siebel Workflow, Task UI, personalization, run-time events, and state model.