Guidelines for Planning Your Siebel Database Upgrade

This topic provides an overview of the recommended guidelines for planning upgrade resources, estimating the upgrade timeline, and managing the data migration process.

Use the following steps to help plan your upgrade.

1. Determine your upgrade path. Upgrade requirements and tasks differ based on the specific upgrade path involved. For more information, see Supported Upgrade Paths for Siebel CRM.

2. Evaluate the complexity of the upgrade. Determine the complexity of the upgrade effort based on the Siebel CRM modules implemented, the number of integration points, the number of interfaces, the total number of scripts, and the number of user interface scripts.

3. Assess the current Siebel environment and evaluate the existing implementation. Perform a detailed assessment of the current Siebel environment to determine how the implementation will be affected by the upgrade. Evaluate the current implementation in comparison with the architecture of the current release. The assessment will help you to identify areas where you can take advantage of new functionality to meet business requirements.

4. Estimate the level of effort to upgrade. Determine the metrics and cost associated with each aspect of the upgrade. Determine the 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, time line, and costs.

5. Establish the upgrade team. Assemble a cross-functional upgrade team that understands Siebel product architecture and performance guidelines. Include IT professionals, executives, and users to ensure a broad base of experience in technical, business, and Siebel-specific skills.

6. Review interface migration tasks. Determine the effort to migrate modified applets and views. This includes associating applets with Web template items and mapping them to Web template controls.

7. Plan for upgrade tuning. Tuning your production upgrade scripts can significantly reduce downtime during the final stages of your 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.

8. Identify data migration tasks. After the upgrade, there might be data migration and repository configuration tasks that must be performed manually. These tasks frequently involve customizations made in prior releases.

9. Plan for end-user training. Analyze the impact of change on the users, and develop a plan for end-user training and adoption.

The upgrade of your application requires several key factors to be successful:

• A detailed understanding of customizations made to your current deployment

• Analysis and definition of the components within your enterprise

• Analysis of how to use new functionality provided by Oracle’s Siebel software

• Strict adherence to industry best practices and guidelines 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.