Siebel Loyalty powers Alaska Air

Alaska Air, a VA2 customer, has implemented some interesting features for notifying customers of impending outages and in some cases automatic travel vouchers. Sounds like the syste was put to the test recently with all the bad weather up in Seattle lately.

Open source perl for Siebel

A cool project, Siebelcmdserver, uses TCP shared key to create a client server program that can access a Siebel Server manager on a remote server.

Basic querying by example, Siebel vs Salesforce

In Siebel, there is default ability to query any set of records that you can see. For example, if record list has 100 records, you can always refine that list by pressing query, and put your search terms dynamically into any of the fields. You can also use seperate special characters with [ ], for querying the underlying Business Component. So power users will be able to query fields that are not even displayed.

From Salesforce search help page: " Salesforce offers two main ways to search for records and tags—Sidebar Search and Advanced Search, accessible via a link in the sidebar. The main differences between the two are outlined below."

The sidebar search does not show up on every screen, for example Setup > Manage Users > Users. If you get a long list of records, there is no way to interact with those records. Instead you should navigate to different screen, where search is enabled via the sidebar, Choose the object from the drop down menu, and query from there.

Salesforce thread on how to search for users.

Ambiguous requirements create failed projects

Too true... Absoultely critical to gather requirements as soon, and as often as possible.

CRM 2009 predictions

A fantatic article by Paul Greenberg, (probabaly?) the top CRM analyst out there. Very wide range survey that doesn't show any religious bias, I learned a lot. Helpstream I think looks the most interesting out of the bunch.

Siebel in China

When I was working in China in 2005, it seemed that hardly any companies there were "ready" for software like Siebel, or enterprise software in general. Many business don't use computers at all, dealing with paper invoicing systems. Looks like the bigger companies are coming online.

Siebel Performance Problems for Telstra

Pretty amazing series of performance problems with Telstra.

If your enterprise software deployment makes it into the news, that is generally bad news. Which is too bad... I would like to see much more information about what users are doing with enterprise apps, especially the sucessful ones. But for now, if its in the news, it is bad. Poor Telstra.

They need some Siebel monitoring! I'm waiting for the email here at Recursive Technology.

Genesys CTI adapter for Salesforce.com

Interesting, this product was released July 28th 2008. The focus seems to be reverse phone number look up, but I assume it would also provide standard click-to-dial and inbound/outbound screen pops.

PHP Flickr and Scriptalicous example

Here. Type in the name of a Flickr user with photo sets created. The PHP also has .css embedded, which is mostly ripped off from Flickr. Then you can drag the photosets into a shopping cart, which uses scriptaculous libraries. From there, not much happens... yet!

If you want it to work, you will have to get supporting code from these tutorials:

http://phpflickr.com/example-a-users-photos/
http://www.ajaxlessons.com/2006/02/19/ajax-workshop-3-shopping-cart-using-scriptaculous/

blackquery - Blackberry Query via email

Well, while riding the bus the other week and looking for an address it took me about 20 minutes to find it on my browser. I thought it would be faster to send an email, have the email execute a google search, and email the response. Especially on a Blackberry, could be faster. Couldn't find a service that offers that, so I wrote this one in, Perl of course.

If you use it, you need:
1. A Pop account that accepts the emails
2. A SMTP account for sending emails
3. You should have a Yahoo API key, though I used a demo one.
4. You have to install the required Perl modules.

This script can run anywhere, not only a server, and recovers from errors and has a log file.

A few things I learned: