1. Database Upgrade Guide
  2. Overview of the Siebel CRM Upgrade Factory

Overview of the Siebel CRM Upgrade Factory

Siebel CRM Upgrade Factory delivers an automated development upgrade that includes the quick setup of a development environment. The upgrade factory approach simplifies the application upgrade process, allowing customers to upload their customized, pre-IP2017 repository to run an upgrade and IRM process on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). In addition, the development upgrade process results in a merged design repository that enables customers to either continue to use it as their new Siebel development environment in the OCI tenancy, or export, and import to their on premises instance to continue development activities there.

Key benefits include:

  • Perform Siebel CRM Upgrades in a cost efficient, low risk manner with a shorter timeframe
  • Dramatically reduce lengthy provisioning cycles
  • Easy to repeat, and run the development upgrades multiple times using the DevOps pipeline
  • Flexibility to move your application with business customizations intact to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), if needed by business
  • Monitor and evaluate Upgrade issues rapidly

Supported Languages and Versions of Siebel CRM

Upgrade Factory enables the efficient transition from Siebel CRM 7.82 and above to the latest Siebel CRM release update. The 22 supported languages are—Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Prerequisites

These are the few prerequisites to keep in mind before you begin installing the upgrade factory:

  • Minimum supported application version—Siebel CRM version 7.82 and above
  • License to Siebel CRM Base Application
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Tenancy
  • Appropriate permissions to create quotas for each compartment
  • Compute capacity: 12 Oracle CPU (OCPU), 32GB RAM allocated under OCI
  • System requirements: Oracle Linux 7 and above
  • Storage space requirements: 200GB

Before you start the upgrade, you must export the database dump using the Oracle Data Pump utility expdp (applies to Oracle Database).

Note: Use the repimexp command to export a repository.

Connect as the system database administrator or sysdba and run the following command.

CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BACKUP_DIR AS <DirectoryPathOnDBServer>;
grant create any directory to <TableOwner>;

GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BACKUP_DIR TO <TableOwner>;
expdp <TableOwner>/<TableOwnerPassword> directory=BACKUP_DIR dumpfile=<DumpFileName>nologfile=y parallel=8 compression=all exclude=statistics 
reuse_dumpfiles=y

The Upgrade Process Flow

Here's the upgrade process flow in a sequence:

  1. Upload the database or repository custom files to OCI
  2. Begin the upgrade through the SCM REST API endpoint
  3. Generate the pre-upgrade assessment report to analyze risks, if any
  4. Review the assessment report
  5. Create an upgrade event
  6. Install the Siebel software to run the upgrade
  7. Prepare the conflict report
  8. Publish the URL to access the conflict report
  9. Resolve conflicts in Web Tools
  10. Complete development upgrade and take the Repository back on premises (if required)
  11. Access link from SCM

The following figure explains the upgrade process flow.

The Upgrade Process flow.

Pre-upgrade Assessment

You can conduct a pre-upgrade assessment using the customer repository, which includes an in-depth review of the existing customizations, infrastructure, business processes and providing repository conflicts summary and complexity scores. With the pre-upgrade assessment, you can assess how many conflicts can be expected by object type; what are the most critical conflicts you might encounter, and so on.

The pre-upgrade report identifies critical configuration issues identified in the repository, repository merge conflicts and recommendations to ensure you have a successful upgrade and limited downtime.

Before you run the pre-upgrade assessment tool, you need the following:

  • Database dump or repository
  • Complete extract of the following folders:
    • SWT (<Siebel_root>/webtempl)
    • Public (<Siebel_Root>/objects/<lang>/srf)
    • CFG (<Web_Server_Root>/public)
  • Environment architecture diagram
  • Completed pre-assessment questionnaire

The pre-upgrade assessment does the following:

  • Assesses the custom configurations
  • Identifies the extensibility of the application
  • Provides details of integration in Siebel CRM
  • Identifies potential conflict areas
  • Applies filters for usage pattern tracking and application-level details
  • Identifies complex modules and customizations

API Endpoints

You can perform operations with different REST APIs. Here are the available APIs:

  • PUT /scm/api/v1.0/upgradefactory — Rerun upgrade environment
  • DELETE /scm/api/v1.0/upgradefactory — Cleanup upgrade environment
  • GET /scm/api/v1.0/upgradefactory — Get upgrade status
  • POST /scm/api/v1.0/upgradefactory — Trigger upgrade with payload