Workspace issues in Siebel 20.3

Hi there ! Long time, no post, no see, eh ? As it turns out, a pandemic filled year leaves one no free time. 

After losing track in lower versions of the trusted Siebel CRM , I have now had the chance to work on an upgraded version. Siebel 20.3. Work started earlier this year, with a massive upgrade on my customer's systems.

And I must say, I am impressed. But also frustrated. 

The new workspace system fixes some of the issues in an earlier checkin/checkout system, but it opens up a whole bunch of new ones.

Like, you have to choose which workspace to merge into, at the time of creation, not at the time of delivery. Strange.

Also, you can't checkin the same workspace to more than one delivery branch. The only way I know to do this is to take SIF backups, and check them into a new workspace under a different branch.

But the one that frustrates the most...is that...there are still some tools objects that do not stay inside workspaces. 

Like Tasks. Of the famous Task Based UIs.

And ...get this...Tables !

These two objects, when modified, or created, immediately get delivered to the main branch !!

Currently, the following object types and their child objects remain as non-workspace objects:
    Table
    Dock Object
    EIM Interface Table
    Repository
    Workflow Policy Column
    Workflow Policy Object
    Workflow Policy Program
    Task
    Task Group
    Project

Now, I am on 20.3 version, so some of these might have been fixed on a newer version. But we are going to be on this version for a while longer so...

...need more coffee.

SalesForce comes crashing down. Again !

I first read about this last Friday. Beloved cloud CRM solution had a data breach, and fixed it by removing all security features.

It seems the US tech giant granted Pardot customers access privileges they should not have, which is to say access to everything and alter any data. As was observed on Reddit, "One of our projects had all its profiles modified to enable modify all, allowing all users access to all data."

To deal with the mess, Salesforce's IT team has denied all access to more than 100 cloud instances that host Pardot users, shutting out everyone else using those same systems, whether or not they were using Pardot.

And the outage continued on Monday. Over the weekend, Salesforce staff developed, tested, and ran a script that attempted to restore user permissions from backups, though this was not always successful. In some cases, it even went backwards, and regranted full read-write permissions to users.

Timeline

- A dodgy database script on Friday gave all current and past Pardot users sysadmin-level create-read-write-delete access to all data, which is a huge security and privacy blunder.

- Instances running Pardot were disabled to avoid any data theft or tampering, which kicked any customers using those instances – Pardot and non-Pardot – off Salesforce.

- Salesforce removed all access permissions from affected users and restored full permissions to customers' administrator accounts, allowing them to repair users' permissions. Some instances were fired back up so folks could log back in, others remained offline. Admins were encouraged to reassign their users' access permissions by hand to allow users to continue working.

- On Saturday, Salesforce was able to restore previous user permissions from a backup using a script on one instance of 105 affected.

- By Sunday, the permission restoration script had been run on the majority of instances, repairing user permissions with an "89 per cent" success rate – meaning about one in ten organizations still had their user rights wiped. Admins were told, if they still had permission issues, to fix it themselves or contact Salesforce support.

- On Monday, Salesforce staff are still working to restore sandboxed instances. We're told GovCloud was not affected by the snafu.

So if you are contemplating moving to the cloud, now will be…a good time ?

BIP: Number to Text , complex version

Oracle never ceases to amaze me. I recently saw this question being asked again on stackoverflow.

Basically, this is an RTF template supposed to print a check. And the amount has to be converted to text, to be printed on the 'Amount' line on the check. BIP provides a function for this called xdofx:to_check_number.
It is documented over here. The function can print the output text in different locales, and decimal number settings. But the number to be printed has to be in an XML node. It only accepts simple XPATH notations, and the value itself cannot be a result of a sum() function, or the result of any mathematical operation.
Which means, if you have an XML like this:

<root>
     <amt>3243243</amt>
     <amt>6436464</amt>
     <amt>243</amt>
     <amt>445454</amt>
     <amt>67676</amt>
</root>

And you want to print the output as the sum of all the 'amt' elements, that cannot be done.

<?xdofx:to_check_number(sum(amt),'EUR')?>

Outputs:

Zero and xx/100



Which leads me to say: WTF Oracle ?

I had solved this problem years ago, but I couldn't remeber how. So I deep dived, again, into the same problem.


Using the RTF template, I exported the XSL-FO stylesheet out:

This extracts the intermediate XSL file BIP uses to generate the final report output.
Search for "to_check_number" in this XSL:

It can be seen that although there is a for-each loop there, the template itself is not called recursively.  It access the element 'amt' without a proper XPATH, and then does a stupid (.///)[1]  whatever that means.

But if you pass a string with the number into the function to_check_number, this works out perfectly.


For the foe-each loop to sum up all the values, it has to call itself recursively. Obviously, this function is broken.

But is there a way to fix this ?

Turns out, there is. Look two lines lower in the XSL file.



It can be seen that the XSL finally invokes another hidden function xdoxslt:toCheckNumber. This namespace is unique, I am guessing it is shared between the XSL and XDO name spaces.

So I tried using this 'hidden' function directly in the template.

Like this:

<?xdoxslt:toCheckNumber($_XDOLOCALE, sum(amt), ('EUR'))?>

Which produces the output:

Voila !!

So in case you have to convert a dynamically generated number to text, use the toCheckNumber function directly.

Which leads to the question, why have the xdo function in the first place ?

But do bear in mind, that this is an undocumented function, which works for now.

The awesome EAI Transaction Service

 

After I finally got to leave the ‘Siebel ecosystem’, I had to return as that was indeed my core competency. And because there are places were Siebel is still awesome.

Like, the concept of a Webservice transaction in Siebel session. I am yet to see other systems implement it.

Siebel provides an awesome business service called ‘EAI Transaction Service’.  It has two methods , BeginTransaction, and EndTransaction. Like the name denotes, you mark the beginning of the your webservice transaction , and then proceed to use ‘EAI Siebel Adapter’ to make your updates, and finally commit everyting with the EndTransaction method.

Nothing gets committed to the system until you End the transaction successfully.

On commit, the last updated date and time on the objects is correctly preserved.

Now, the truly awesome thing. Although the documentation mentions use of Siebel EAI services, any update can be done in the transaction, and they all will be treated the same way.

It works for scripting !

It works of Workflow updates as well.

So if you use a script to update a record, that update also will be commited only if the EndTransaction method is invoked successfully.

 

Otherwise, everything gets rolled back.

In other words, you don’t have to be doing EAI work in Siebel to use this BS. You can use it wherever you need to rollback changes in case something does not work out well. Doc ID 1293943.1

 

 

If only we could rollback our own mistakes in life like that .

Hard sell

 

Been hearing some stories about Oracle's power plays here in Australia. It seems they are strong arming existing customers to force them to move directly into their cloud offerings.

And it is not even cheap. Instead of a direct upgrade of any on-premise siebel installation, they are trying to sell my current client their CX cloud offering. With a total cost of 10 million over 5 years ! 4 million per annum for CX cloud !

This is a hard sell. Specially looking at other alternatives in the market.

So it was no surprise there, when we unanimously threw that option out of the window.

So now, back to  Siebel On-Premise for now.

 

xmlstarlet & xidel, xml parsing from the command line

 

For xml parsing from the command line, xmlstartlet and xidel require the ‘-‘ switch at the end to read from stdin. This has to be used during piping

 

curl http://gist.bbldtl.int:9000/ema/HUBQ1\?page\=log\&message_id\=52285748 | xidel -e '//pre' -   

 

 

Or:

curl http://gist.bbldtl.int:9000/ema/HUBQ1\?page\=log\&message_id\=52285748 | xmllint --format --xpath '//pre' - 

 

xidel removes the enclosing tags by default. So that’s better.

SAP back with C/4 HANA

SAP has overhauled its CRM offering, launching a suite of applications under the banner C/4HANA, as the German biz best known for ERP aims to take on Salesforce.

Speaking today at SAP’s annual gabfest, Sapphire Now, chief executive Bill McDermott touted the move as a huge step change for SAP that would modernise CRM by focusing not on sales but the consumer.

The firm is aiming to use its strong position in the back-office market to convince users to also adopt its front-office, CRM, products.

It is offering full integration with ERP suite S/4HANA, as well as various other bells and whistles, such as a new data management suite for full control of highly distributed data, which was also launched today.

McDermott said that users were tired of “legacy CRM” and were unhappy with the customer experience offered by existing vendors.

He described the change as being “from a 360 degree view of sales automation, where some companies focus, to a 360 degree view of the actual customer.”

This is central to what the firm is pushing when it talks about C/4HANA: their system is based on the consumer, when existing offerings focus on sales.

Alex Atzberger, president of SAP Customer Experience, said during the keynote session that customers are increasingly in charge of defining their relationships with companies.

“They don’t think about B2B and B2C, they think about ‘Me2b’,” he said, arguing that companies need to recognise that consumers are gaining the power to define brands, and will “rebel against being treated like sales opportunities.”

The CRM suite was heavily hinted at during the firm’s Q1 earnings call, when McDermott said SAP was going to “rebrand the whole CRM category.”

In a press and analysts session today, McDermott threw more shots across the bows, saying of SAP’s competitors: “We have a new idea, a better idea - and the better idea always wins.”

He added: “We will not waiver, we will not bend until we finally take over the CRM marketplace.”

Although he didn’t mention Salesforce by name, he didn’t have to: the firm has dominated the CRM market for years, with SAP ranked second, followed by Oracle and then Microsoft, Adobe and others.

In 2017, Gartner put Salesforce with an 18.8 per cent market share, and was growing faster than the market rate, while SAP had 8.5 per cent worldwide share and grew slightly slower.

And the pressure is on SAP to catch up - Gartner analyst Ed Thompson said the CRM market is expected to reach more than $75bn by end of 2022, compared with $44nn for ERP, meaning that SAP has to do well in CRM - but it still has more to do.

"It will take more than just launching C4/HANA to close the gap," he said. "They’ll need to find a way to appeal to those who are not existing SAP customers for CRM, widen their ecosystem of ISV and consulting partners, and make ground in the industries they haven’t traditionally sold CRM to."

SAP's launch comes after a series of CRM acquisitions made by the firm, including one announced today, of Swiss field service management biz Coresystems, which provides real-time scheduling for customer service requests.

Other recent acquisitions include a $2.4bn deal to buy sales performance management firm CallidusCloud and a $350m buy of customer identity management biz Gigya, while it acquired ecommerce plaform Hybris for $1.4bn in 2013.

These have been built into the C/4HANA suite as SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud and SAP Commerce Cloud.

Thompson said that bringing these products under one brand, as C/4HANA, was a good move to consolidate SAP's architectures and "remove confusing sub-brands" so it had one roadmap in the CRM market.

"But it will require a quick follow up with details on architecture and roadmap to back up the strategy, and it doesn’t yet address the issue of how this will encourage a CRM ecosystem of partners and facilitate increased innovation," he added.

The decision to rebrand its CRM offering as an end-to-end service that integrates with SAP’s ERP offerings is part of wider moves to get customers back on side.

During 2017, the firm’s crackdown on indirect access saw customers with software that connected to data stored on SAP systems - even indirectly - worried they would be hit with a high cost sueball.

This became more of an issue in recent years due to the number of other systems accessing SAP’s increased rapidly - and indeed, Salesforce was among that number.

Although SAP recently overhauled its licensing rules, presumably the firm will be happy to ease customers’ minds by suggesting they just use SAP’s new CRM suite instead.