Wednesday 19 November 2014

Open UI IP 2014 is finally here! - First look is here - Is it truly responsive?

As most of you aware, IP 2014 is now available on eDelivery!

I was very eager to see the responsive web design part of it! So went ahead and downloaded and setup my sample. The first look – impressive layout. Though, in my case, it is opening only on firefox and IE11 (haven’t tried other IE versions). In Chrome it keeps spinning. You need to set
EnableFQDN               = FALSE in your cfg for it to work!

Important Update:(From Alex on siebel-essentials) Please be aware that Patchset 1 for Innovation Pack 2014 will be mandatory for production use. Patchset 1 will be made available on My Oracle Support in due time (official GA). In the meantime, you can benefit from using the installers for evaluation and upgrade preparations and of course peruse the new documentation to learn about new features.

See the general navigation below.


MVGs back to how they were in HI!


Editing attachments inline – users are eagerly waiting for it! See it here.

Note: inline editing worked only on Firefox and not on chrome for me.

I am disappointed by the responsiveness. See here,


Above, you can see the list and form applets are pretty static. Only Logo, Menu, toolbar etc are dynamically changing. I was hoping much more as part of IP2014 on this. I was imagining List Applets to reduce in height and users will be able to scroll on list applet with their fingers on smaller devices. I was hoping Form Applets will adjust the layout based on the device size. It’s time for more explorations and custom PRs to make that happen!

More to come, hold on till then!

Cheers,
Shiv

Friday 14 November 2014

Open UI - styling your form applets - add sections or tabs!

Most of the complaints you hear from typical Siebel users is that their screens are bulky, seeing a lot of unnecessary fields dumped into one big form applet. How about redesigning them so that you logically group only the relevant fields into one group and show only that group at a time.

I found Jquery UI has accordion and tab options to display content in group. See below to see them in action.
ezgif-optimize

You can get Accordion demo on jquery ui site here: http://jqueryui.com/accordion/


ezgif-optimize (1)


You can get Tabbed display demo on jquery ui site here: http://jqueryui.com/tabs/#mouseover

Go through their example to understand how they do it.

Now, I leveraged above in to my Siebel form applets and here is the outcome.



How to go about?

Tuesday 11 November 2014

Siebel monitoring – build your own and of course free!


Taking a bit of a side track from Open UI topic here. There are very few of the shelf tools available in the market when it comes to monitoring your Siebel servers which can
  • monitor servers and components at a micro level
  • Alert admin users before your business starts complaining.
  • Easily configurable
How about building your own monitoring? I am considering two use cases to demo it.
  1. a job which monitors the servers status and alert set of users by email if any of the server is not Online.
  2. a job which monitors set of listed components and alert users if any of them in trouble via email
All I am using is srvrmgr command and analyse the output and take appropriate action. I am doing this using simple VB coding. You don’t need to have any paid tools – only windows platform is needed as you will run your VB code using cscript.

use case 1: To monitor servers (by status)
The need:
At every 10 mins, (or at desired interval)