Integration with Siebel On-Premise CRM?

Question

Has anyone ever integrated an external web application with Siebel On-Premise CRM? Note that I'm not talking about Siebel On-Demand SaaS, but their behind-the-firewall product. Specifically, I'm trying to achieve two-way synchronization of CRM objects (contacts, accounts, sales opportunities) between my web application and a customer's internal Siebel setup. Are there any well-known techniques for initiating or receiving external connections from a Siebel On-Premise installation.

Answer 1

I had to intgrate an applicaiton with Siebel, and it did prove to be pretty difficult. In the end I had to use the CTI interface, designed for handling Telephone calls and routing them to siebel. I basically had to trick it into thinking it was receiving a call and piggy back the data onto this. Obviously this would only work if you allready use the CTI interface and have it setup.

Answer 2

Siebel On-Premise offers a wealth of integration options. Start with Siebel Bookshelf and specifically Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration.

For your more static data, have a look at MDM. In this case refer to Siebel Master Data Applications Reference for Industry Applications.

Otherwise, webservices or Siebel's prebuilt ASI's offer alternatives. Exchanging XML through webservices which map data to Siebel Integration Objects, which map to Siebel Business Components, is pretty much standard fare from the architectural point-of-view.

Answer 3

Worked on a couple of Siebel projects for my sins. Standard ways to interface include: - Web Services (which I think MoMo was referring to) - you'll need to check with the Siebel app team to see if this is / can be turned on; also, the vanilla services might need to be modified to reflect any modifications to the Siebel data structures; even in Siebel this has become the standard way to interface between web apps - Direct reads from the Siebel database tables (you can't write to them though for very special and sad reasons); fast and no mods required - Direct writes to the Siebel EIM database tables (you can write to them and then get the Siebel Server to run a data-load job); fast, but needs the data-load job to run - I think there is some JBeans support but I don't know if it works or not

Drop by the Oracle support site and look for a document called "Overview: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration"

OK - so you'll also need to remember that Siebel is a bit weird so you will need a Siebel dev to help you out with understanding what the hell is going on...