Platform

This topic is part of Global Deployment Terminology.

The platform determines what data can be processed in a Siebel CRM deployment. The character set encoding and operating system language of a platform will determine what data can be handled correctly and what data will not be handled correctly by the platform.

This guide uses the term platform in several places to discuss deployment options as well as specific functionality available in Siebel CRM.

Siebel CRM generally does not support mixed character encoding environments. The reason is that it is not technically possible to manage an environment that uses multiple character set encodings on databases and servers without a genuine risk of losing data in the process.

For example, suppose a database is set up with a Western European character set encoding and a user tries to insert Japanese data through a Siebel Server set up for Japanese. Depending on the actual database, the effect could be that the user’s data would be rejected and not stored in the database, or the data could get converted by the database and stored incorrectly as unreadable characters (substitution characters), resulting in loss of the original Japanese data.