Siebel Upgrade Best Practices & Processes- Dinesh Chandrasekar

1. Siebel Upgrade Best Practices & Processes Confidential | Copyright © Sierra Atlantic 1 Dinesh Chandrasekar Practice Head CRM & MDM CoE

2. Today’s Objectives To discuss Siebel upgrade planning best practices To outline an tried and true upgrade flow and approach To discuss Siebel upgrade execution best practices

3. Agenda Upgrade Planning – Best Practices Upgrade Flow Upgrade Execution Best Practices Questions

5. A Clear Cost vs. Benefits Analysis – The costs of maintaining the legacy Siebel app should outweigh the costs of the upgrade OR the risk of not upgrading is greater than the cost of upgrading

6. A Clear New App ROI – The new Siebel app should deliver clear and measurable ROI

8. Upgrade Versions and Paths: One-step vs. Two-steps Most upgrades will be a one-step process Two-step upgrade applies to: 6.x version upgrading to 8.1 On your first upgrade go with the highest version i.e. 6.x would go to 7.7; not 7.5 Don’t do any more work after the first upgrade than necessary don’t compile a SRF, test application, etc Resolve all conflict after each upgrade

9. How Long Will the Upgrade Take? If you have performed an upgrade in the past, you can benchmark your time by: Last upgrade was version 6 to 7, then this upgrade should require less time Last upgrade was 7 to 7.7, then this upgrade should require the same amount of time If you have never done an upgrade, you can estimate your time by: The length of time it took for the original implementation and take 25% to 50% since steps such as requirements and build much small if even needed *7.x upgrade from start to finish including testing and deployment will take 4-5 months

11. Analyze

12. Perform a trial run

13. Inventory all applets, views and screens

14. Upgrade Development/QA

15. Follow the upgrade flow

16. Upgrading the QA environments a good benchmark for Production

17. Test

18. Training and change management activities

19. Upgrade Production

20. Follow the upgrade flow

21. Deploy

22. Planning for phase 2 can beginProduction Phase 2 - Enhancements

23. Agenda Upgrade Planning – Best Practices Upgrade Flow Upgrade Execution Best Practices Questions

24. Confidential | Copyright © Sierra Atlantic 10 Upgrade Flow

25. Upgrade Infrastructure Make sure your hardware and software are up to required specification for the upgrade Review Support Platforms Guide Review all Alerts, Tech Notes, FAQ’s, etc. Consider new or changed functionality Complete all upgrade assessments

26. Pre-Upgrade Tasks Prepare the Siebel database for the upgrade Close all database connections Clear all pending workflow tasks Disable triggers Workflow Process Migration Make sure workflow in development are the same as production if not, otherwise; when production is upgraded workflows will be lost Best practice: All production workflows should be in development Delete all old repositories

27. Upgrade Tasks Run the database server configuration utility (upgrep) to perform a basic upgrade of the database schema and loads repository in prep for merge Merge repository using Siebel Tools* Run postmerge utilities to analyze your customizations and apply changes to them as needed to conform to the new user interface* Run the database server configuration utility (upgphys) this will further upgrade the database with the changes resulting form the repository merge *Development Environment Only

28. Post-Upgrade Tasks Set up environment Compile latest SRF Extract developer’s databases Application Administration Verify user access and visibly of views and screens Application configuration Prepare QA environment for testing Validate application data: LOV, views, responsibilities, etc. Test the system Unit test the development environment Full regression and stress test QA User Acceptance

29. Agenda Upgrade Planning – Best Practices Upgrade Flow Upgrade Execution Best Practices Questions

30. Upgrep Best Practices Upgrep: The Utility that upgrades the database schema and loads the repository for the new version of Siebel Performance Problems? Verify preparation activities were done Assume the same problem will happen in QA/Prod Use the logparse utility to check for errors Compare to errors.rtf Understand the steps upgrep is performing Remember upgrep is restartable Do take all recommended backups between steps Failures are common: usually due to missed steps Other common problems: Not enough table or index space Network timeouts

31. Merge Repository Best Practices Run the repository merge on a Windows app server with fast processors, fast disk and lots of memory if available Search merge0.txt for string “!!ERROR” If errors occur, this will be noted in the status field on the application upgrade applet Screens->Application Upgrader Use Support Web’s Troubleshooting Steps. Explanations of most errors can be found here Focus on fixing non-UI conflicts Only “Upgrade Ancestor” type errors are considered acceptable Search for deleted objects that have been added back Search for obsolete object that you are using Document these during the assessment

32. General Upgrade Best Practices Upgrade Ancestors (Inheritance) Should have been set as objects were cloned; if upgrading from a release that didn’t allow this, do it after UPGREP and before the repository merge You can always use object comparison after the upgrade to synchronize copied objects with OOTB objects Incorporate Custom Layout (ICL) can save time when upgrading 7.x to 7.8 if you extensively modified OOTB applets instead of making copies Provides SOME consistency in UI by maintaining the controls and their locations form previous release Due to changes in view navigation (aggregates&categories), view groups are not completely preserved 6.x version may need to visit each form and list applet Form: controls, labels, vertical spacing, group boxes List: max# of columns per applet 6.x version should run script analyzer to determine which script features are not compatible wit 7.8 Applet script will need to be moved to applet server script Replace MsgBox with RaiseErrorText Siebel has a utility that can help convert VB code to eScript Don’t assume 7.0 and 7.5 scripts will upgrade smoothly to 7.8 Only fields displayed on applet can have their values “gotten”

33. Testing Upgrade Best Practices Plan to upgrade test environment at least twice; maybe more Restore test with a copy of production First time upgrade in parallel to development to determine if performance will be an issue Do not underestimate testing for the upgrade Allow the same amount of testing time as it took in our initial implementation Consider performance and stress testing Test new 7.8 load balancing Test data as well as the application Test data migration if migration scripts changed

34. Confidential | Copyright © Sierra Atlantic 20