3Planning Global Deployments

Planning Global Deployments

This chapter provides high-level guidelines in how to successfully plan a global deployment of Siebel CRM. It includes the following topics:

• Understanding Your Company’s Global Business Requirements

• Expected Results of Global Deployment Planning

• About Ideal Global Deployments

• About the Siebel Unicode Architecture

• About Planning Your Global Deployment

• About Configuring Global Deployments

• Scenarios for Installing and Deploying Siebel Languages

• Planning Upgrades for Global Deployments

Understanding Your Company’s Global Business Requirements

Imagine that your company tells you that it wants to market the software it develops to four other countries and wants the applications to run in the languages of those countries. How do you start? What do you need to consider to make sure that the new product development effort is successful? What do you need to think about when customizing Siebel CRM for this purpose?

Although you must take your company’s unique business requirements into consideration in your planning, this guide offers tips and guidelines for undertaking a global product rollout and maintenance in general, as well as configuring the Siebel CRM applications in particular.

By addressing the following questions concerning your organization’s global business needs, you will have gone a long way towards planning for your global deployment of Siebel CRM:

• Will your company have one central business location from which all of the business transactions originate, or regional decentralized (distributed) locations for transactions?

  • If your enterprise is decentralized, then does your company need to keep the transactions synchronized, for example, banking transactions?

  • Will remote users synchronize their transactions to a central corporate database or a regional database?

• Are computer telephony integration (CTI) servers, email servers, Oracle Business Intelligence servers, and other servers centralized or regional?

• Which languages does your company headquarters require?

• Which language will be the base, or primary, language with which you begin your development and customization process? The first language installed in the Siebel database is the primary language.

• Have you previously customized any language files from a previous version of Siebel CRM, or configured a new language not yet offered for Siebel CRM?

  Languages previously provided for Siebel CRM can be upgraded. If you previously localized into a language that Siebel CRM now provides directly, then you must either merge your previous use of this language with the Siebel language, or keep them separate.

• Which locales are the languages intended for (for example, French-speaking Canada or France)?

  • Which locale settings will be needed as a result? The answer to this will affect the way currency, numbers, dates, and times are formatted in the software.

  • Because additional Siebel Application Object Managers will be needed for each locale and language combination, determine in advance the implications for memory and performance of the products that you use.

• What character set will you use for your database: a Unicode or a non-Unicode character set?

  This decision has far-reaching implications for the ease with which your organization can deploy globally. If you do not implement a Unicode database, then you might not be able to support all of the languages that your business uses. In that case, you will not be able to roll up data from those countries into your Siebel applications, or into a data warehouse.

• Are there legacy interfaces that you need to consider in your planning and do these have implications for your back-office applications? In which code page is the data of your back-office applications expected? Is there a need to convert between code pages, such as from Unicode to non-Unicode?

• Who will localize your customizations?

• Are there particular legal requirements that you must meet within your global network (for example, as regards European Union Data Protection Directives, Basel II, or others)?

Expected Results of Global Deployment Planning

The answers to the questions in Understanding Your Company’s Global Business Requirements will help determine your:

• Globalization strategy

• Globalization project timeline

• Network diagram

• Capacity planning

• Call handling strategy for CTI and call center features

• Localization scope, for example, for the List of Views and Applets by language

• Localization budget

• List of modifications that you need for preconfigured functions required by a specific locale

• List of tables and data to be exchanged with other applications, as determined from your analysis of any legacy interfaces

By considering the questions listed in Understanding Your Company’s Global Business Requirements before you undertake a global deployment, you stand to decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO) your company pays for its global outreach, in the form of:

• Driving down the cost of localization development

• Decreasing global deployment costs in general

• Shortening the time to market for global deployments

About Ideal Global Deployments

The following figure provides an example of what an ideal global deployment of Siebel CRM might look like. Keep in mind that few companies necessarily meet an ideal. However, with proper planning, the ideal is a goal that can be achieved.

In this example, six languages (Siebel Language Packs) have been installed on the Siebel Server. Different Application Object Managers running on this Siebel Server can display the application user interface in these languages.

The Siebel database in this example uses Unicode and therefore supports all of the characters required for the six languages installed on the example Siebel Server. The other two languages shown, Chinese (CHS) and French (FRA), must be supported for customer data in this example deployment, even though these two languages are not used for the Siebel application user interface.

The preceding figure illustrates an ideal centralized global deployment of Siebel applications. Unicode is the character set of the database in this ideal configuration.

For a production environment, you can specify the collation sequence most suitable for your deployment. For the development environment, only binary collation sequence is supported. For more information, see About the Database Collation Sequence.

Where necessary, character set conversions take place to and from all of the Siebel (Unicode) data sources and other data sources.

Siebel clients run in this deployment on localized operating systems with Unicode fonts installed for selected users. The user interface appears in the language of the user’s choice. Even languages such as Japanese (JPN) and Arabic (ARA) are encoded properly.

For more information about installing languages, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

It is strongly recommended that you enable Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) for your global deployment. For more information, see Deploying Siebel CRM with Global Time Zone.

Also enable multilingual lists of values (MLOVs) for your global deployment. For more information about configuring LOVs and MLOVs, see Localizing Lists of Values and Multilingual Lists of Values.

The ideal global configuration allows deployment of Siebel CRM to satisfy the requirements for either a centralized or a decentralized (distributed) global enterprise.

A centralized global deployment might require only a single Siebel CRM installation, and consolidates all of the customer-related information in one data store, creating a single, global view of customers transactions. A centralized deployment is easier and cheaper to maintain and might be satisfactory, depending on your business needs.

A decentralized (distributed) global deployment might have Siebel CRM instances in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, as shown in the following figure. Data is replicated between these sites using Siebel Replication Manager. For more information, see Siebel Deployment Planning Guide, Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide, and other applicable documentation.

About the Siebel Unicode Architecture

The Siebel CRM software architecture uses Unicode, including for internal processing. There are many benefits to using Unicode, such as the ability to show multilingual data in the same session. The following figure provides a graphical representation of the architecture, while the table that follows describes the flow of data through the Siebel Unicode architecture.

The following table describes the flow of data through the Siebel Unicode architecture. For more information about supported databases, see the Certifications tab on My Oracle Support.

Table Siebel Unicode Architecture Data Flow

Step Number	Text Encoding
1	User input is URL-encoded by JavaScript or the browser.
2	JavaScript code and style sheets are in ASCII. Note: Style sheet files can be saved as UTF-8 in order to be able to specify font names that contain non-ASCII characters.
3	HTML pages are in ASCII, or UTF-8 if hard-coded non-ASCII content is required.
4	The Application Interface sends input (still in URL encoding) to the Siebel Server. The Siebel Server decodes input immediately to the Siebel internal encoding (UTF-16).
5	The application configuration file (CFG) is UTF-8. (Some parameter values might specify non-ASCII text for elements such as font names or splash screen text.)
6	Most of the C++ code uses the Siebel internal encoding (UTF-16).
7	The Application Object Manager uses UTF-16 to communicate with the database. The internal encoding of the database can be UTF-8, UTF-16, or a code page. The database includes the Siebel runtime repository and the Web templates.
8	The Siebel Web Engine (SWE), which is part of the Application Object Manager, sends the HTML page (in UTF-16) to the Application Interface.
9	The Application Interface transcodes, or converts, the HTML page to UTF-8 for the World Wide Web and passes the HTML page (in UTF-8) to the browser.
10	The browser code (JavaScript) reads the HTML page in UTF-16.
11	The resource libraries (such as DLL files) store content in UTF-16.

About Planning Your Global Deployment

As you evaluate your global deployment needs, start with the following steps:

1. Determine what your base application language will be, for example, U.S. English (ENU).

2. Consider the available industry-specific products and the operating systems that you use.

3. Install and configure the Siebel CRM software for a development environment. For details, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using, and see the last step in this task (which is for a production environment). For more information about the development environment, see Using Siebel Tools.

   Note: The specific installation and configuration tasks that you must perform, as well as the sequence that you perform them in, vary depending on your installation case. For details, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using. In general, the information presented here assumes the new installation case.

4. Determine which application elements need to be localized. For example:

   • Menus

   • Picklists

   • Lists of values

   • View names

   • Strings in applets

   • Correspondence templates

   • Communications templates (for example, for Siebel Email Response, Send Email, or Send Fax)

   • Forecasts

   • Personalization rules

   • Workflow policies

   • Assignment rules

   • Currency

   • Master data (for example, product and catalog data)

   • iHelp

     For more information about creating and administering iHelp, see Siebel Applications Administration Guide.

5. Perform a gap analysis to determine functionality that needs to be improved or that needs to be turned off.

   You might determine that you need to perform additional steps to enable multilingual support. For example, you might want to enable multilingual lists of values to support multilingual picklists. In this case, evaluate your Siebel CRM applications’ performance for columns used in search specifications.

6. Configure your Siebel CRM software based on your company’s business requirements. For details on application configuration tasks, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications and other applicable documentation.

7. Test and validate your localized applications. Correct any issues before deployment.

8. For a production environment, deploy the Siebel CRM applications to a global user base. For details, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using, Siebel Database Upgrade Guide, and other books on the Siebel Bookshelf. Do the following:

   • Install the Siebel Gateway, Siebel Server, Siebel Application Interface, and other modules, with the Siebel Language Packs that you require, for your production system. The language packs include the language-specific run-time environment: resource libraries such as DLL files, configuration (CFG) files, error messages, help files, and so on. (You will also deploy files that you updated during the application configuration process.) For more information about this task, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

   • Install the Siebel database for the production environment. This task installs seed data and repository data for the primary language into the Siebel database. For more information about this task, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using. For more information about the production environment, see Using Siebel Tools.

   • Install language-specific seed data for all of the other deployed languages into the Siebel database.

   • Install language-specific repository data for all of the other deployed languages into the Siebel database.

   • Using Siebel Management Console, configure the Siebel Gateway, Siebel Enterprise, Siebel Server, Siebel Application Interface, and other modules. For more information about this task, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

   • Install the Siebel Mobile Web Client and deploy it in the local language by including the necessary Siebel Language Packs.

     For more information, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using, Siebel Remote and Replication Manager Administration Guide, and Siebel Anywhere Administration Guide.

Note: Many tasks for multilingual deployments are more complex and time-consuming than they are for a single-language deployment. Such tasks include installing applications, localizing custom configurations, administering data in multiple languages (MLOV and master data), testing localized applications in each deployed language, training users, and so on. Depending on your requirements, additional hardware might be needed to support deploying multilingual applications globally.

About Configuring Global Deployments

By answering the following questions, you will be underway to planning for configuration of your global network applications. For detailed information about configuration tasks, see Configuring Global Deployments.

• Which address applet layouts do you want to modify for your target countries?

• Which Name layouts do you want to modify for your target country and languages?

• Do you want to add preferred language to contact records? The preferred language is the language in which a customer prefers to receive communications such as email messages, brochures, and so on.

• Do you want to separate prospect lists by country and language?

• Do you want to add a language code or country code to attachment names? Doing so can help you to identify attachments that are intended only for an audience using a particular language or page size, for example.

• Do you want to extend product masters, training course descriptions, and other master data to have local language versions? Doing so can help you provide such information to the right audience.

• Do you want to mark selected data records with a country or language tag? Doing so can help you roll up sales records originating in a particular country or region, for example.

• Have you converted LOVs to MLOVs (multilingual LOVs), where appropriate? Have you updated LOVs or MLOVs with international content, for example, lists of countries, offices, and other data? Have you added organizations by country or region? Organizations can be defined as countries. See also Localizing Lists of Values and Multilingual Lists of Values.

• Have you created localized response templates for email?

• Have you created multilingual PDQs? This term refers to PDQs that are constrained by language or by country, in order for the query names to display using the appropriate language.

• Have you modified custom search criteria to match non-English records?

• Have you created localized seed and demo data?

• Have you modified workflows to perform LOV value lookup?

By addressing the foregoing questions, you can achieve the following outcomes:

• Address and name applets are formatted to your target countries.

• LOVs or MLOVs, and PDQs are configured.

• Email servers and other third-party servers are configured.

• Seed and demo data are localized.

• Workflows are modified for language and locale.

• Global data, SmartScripts, iHelp, and so on are localized.

Scenarios for Installing and Deploying Siebel Languages

This topic summarizes deployment scenarios when you plan to deploy multiple Siebel Language Packs for your Siebel CRM software. It is strongly recommended to include all of the languages that you might require when you first install the Siebel CRM software.

Note: For detailed information about these scenarios, including prerequisites, limitations, installation and configuration instructions, and associated tasks performed for the Siebel database, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

Consider the following scenarios for installing and deploying multiple Siebel Language Packs:

• Install and deploy all of the languages you require once. For customers installing and deploying languages shipped with the current version of Siebel CRM, and who do not plan to deploy other languages at a later date. This option is easiest but might not be suitable for phased language deployments.

• Install all of the languages you will require, but deploy some languages later. For customers installing and deploying languages shipped with the current version of Siebel CRM, but who plan to deploy some of the installed languages at a later date. This option might be suitable for phased language deployments.

• Install and deploy additional languages in an existing deployment. For customers installing and deploying languages shipped with the current version of Siebel CRM, and who plan to install and deploy additional languages at a later date. This option might be suitable for some phased language deployments.

  Note: To add languages into an existing installation of the current release, you must use the installer of the same version and you must use the unattended installation (silent installation) method. For more information, see the Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

Planning Upgrades for Global Deployments

This topic describes considerations for planning a successful upgrade of Siebel CRM within a global deployment.

For detailed information about the upgrade process, see Siebel Database Upgrade Guide. See also Siebel Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.

Planning for the Upgrade

Addressing the questions in the following list will help you prepare for a successful upgrade of Siebel CRM within a global deployment.

• What database version do you use?

  Where applicable, you must upgrade your RDBMS to a supported version for the current version of Siebel CRM. If you are moving to Unicode, then the new database version might also make this possible.

• What version of Siebel CRM will you be upgrading from? Current versions of Siebel CRM support Unicode.

• Do you know what is involved in migrating your data to Unicode?

• Did you previously deploy a customized language not certified for Siebel CRM? Such languages are also referred to as unshipped languages. See also Localizing an Unshipped Language.

• Do you know how to upgrade date-time fields to Universal Time Coordinated (UTC)? See also Deploying Siebel CRM with Global Time Zone.

• Are the Siebel Language Packs that you require released and available? Are specific Siebel release levels (including patches) required for implementing these languages?

• Have you upgraded client computers (including keyboards, fonts, locales installed, and localized operating system) to support the new installed languages?

• Have you evaluated the need to upgrade all of the third-party products to versions that support Unicode, the countries or locales that you will be localizing for, and the languages that you require?

Results to Expect After Upgrading

After you have addressed the previously described issues and performed the necessary upgrade tasks, you will have gone through the following conversion processes:

1. Updating databases and Siebel versions to current versions.

2. Converting data to Unicode or to another code page that is supported with newer versions of Siebel CRM.

   Note: Conversion to Unicode requires the assistance of Oracle’s Application Expert Services. Contact your Oracle sales representative for Oracle Advanced Customer Services to request assistance from Oracle’s Application Expert Services.

3. Converting selected LOVs to MLOVs.

4. Converting selected date-time data to UTC.