About Assigning Employees to a Configuration

The purpose of assigning employees to configurations is to handle uncommon situations, such as having one particular employee retrieve and test an upgrade kit. In most cases, testing is done using special test accounts and test configurations, and regular employees are associated with a specific configuration based on a ComponentName entry in the client's application CFG file.

This topic is part of Modifying and Creating Siebel Anywhere Configurations.

For the procedure for assigning employees to a configuration, see Assigning Employees to a Configuration.

For example, for the Siebel Sales application, the default value of ComponentName in the siebel.cfg file would be Siebel Sales Client. This means that everyone using the Siebel Sales application is automatically associated with the Siebel Sales configuration.

Assigning employees to a configuration in the Employees list in the Upgrade Configurations view can be used in place of the entry in the CFG file, or as a method for overriding the entry in the CFG file.

Caution: It is strongly recommended that you run only the Siebel Web Client (the client type that does not require a Siebel installer) for user accounts that have Siebel administrator responsibilities, to make sure that administrative tasks are performed while connected to the HQ Server, and to make sure that the administrator is not prevented from logging in for reasons related to component versions. If you run the Siebel Developer Web Client for any administrator account, then it is strongly recommended that the account not be associated with a Siebel Anywhere configuration. This precaution also helps prevent version-related login problems.

When associating employees to configurations, keep in mind the following recommendations:

• Do not dynamically assign the Siebel administrator to a configuration.

• Do not dynamically assign Siebel Tools users to a configuration.

  Siebel Anywhere will not allow an employee to be dynamically associated with more than one configuration. For example, if the employee JSMITH is dynamically associated with Configuration A and the Siebel administrator then associates JSMITH with Configuration B, then JSMITH is automatically disassociated from Configuration A and associated only with Configuration B.

  Caution: If an employee is accidentally associated with an incorrect configuration, then that employee is disassociated from the correct configuration and might not have access to upgrades that are distributed to the correct configuration. For this reason, it is best to correct the configuration assignment without delay.

If an employee will use more than one installation of the Siebel client in the same Siebel Business Applications implementation, then do not associate that employee with a configuration. For example, if the employee JSMITH chooses to install and use both Siebel Call Center and Siebel Sales, then do not dynamically associate that employee with a Siebel Anywhere configuration. The reason is the upgrade kit for one configuration will likely be different than the upgrade kit for another configuration.

In this example, the CFG file would be different for the Siebel Call Center and Siebel Sales configurations. If JSMITH were dynamically associated to the Call Center configuration and logged in using the Siebel Sales client, then the version check would only detect that there was a new upgrade kit and would not differentiate between the two installations of the Siebel client.

If the login is specified under an Employees view, then Siebel Anywhere does not check the CFG file any further and only checks the version of the component listed under the associated configuration for that client. Typically, Siebel Anywhere groups users by the product they use, for example Call Center or Sales Client, which is determined by the CFG file the user uses.

Note: The first time a Mobile Web Client connects to the Siebel Remote Server to initialize the local database, Siebel Anywhere does a version check for the client using the Upgrade Configuration specified in the CFG file. Siebel Anywhere cannot detect a dynamic configuration assignment at this time. However, after the Mobile Web Client successfully initializes the local database, Siebel Anywhere can detect any dynamic configuration assignment for that client.