Mobile Siebel with OnTheMove

OnTheMove for Siebel UX

The founders of OnTheMove have worked with Siebel for over 20 years. We have a great respect for the core technology, the pre-built vertical functionality and Oracle’s continued commitment to the platform. And, anyway, may be you just can’t go to the cloud or Siebel is too integrated into your existing processes to permit replacement.

But the standard user experience? It is too hard, it is too confusing, and it looks like it was originally designed in 1997 (because it was). This costs customers real money – more training, more support, worse data quality, disillusioned staff. The list just goes on and on.

Open UI promised a great deal but it doesn’t solve the problem. True, you can build a good, or even great, user experience in Open UI but it requires a lot of technical knowledge (web development and Siebel). Also, unless you are exceptionally skilled and careful, you will end up with something that is hard and expensive to maintain.

OnTheMove, standalone or Open UI embed, is the answer. Start thinking 2022, not 1997. Start thinking configuration, not hard core development. And start thinking weeks to fix the problem, not months or years.

OnTheMove Technology for Siebel UX

At its core, OnTheMove for Siebel, is an HTML5 application. But instead of being hard coded and specific to each individual Siebel configuration it is a generic framework, built using the latest technology such as React. Your specific views are defined by meta-data. Want to add a new field to your layout. No problem and no coding required. Simply add a new section to a json like this:

"TextBox": {
    "value": "AccountName.RawValue()",
    "characterCount": {
        "bc": "bcAccount",
        "field": "AccountName"
    }
}

Want more fine grained control? Then we have a host of additional properties to provide that – in our example, we are going to show the number of characters entered and the maximum available. And very soon, there will also be a Business Analyst friendly portal so you won’t need to know about json and will even be pre-validating your configuration. You can read more about the common framework, which we call OnTheMove Platform, here.

Siebel Interaction

So how does this all interact with Siebel? Clearly, you don’t want additional databases, you don’t want to rework your business logic, you don’t want to have to upgrade Siebel and you don’t want an additional security layer to manage. Book a configuration demo and technical deep dive to answer all your questions but in summary:

• Online and offline are the same UI technology but with a different data source. In both cases the UI is declared through the standard UI definition process but in online we pull the data directly from Siebel and in offline we synchronize to a browser data store (IndexedDB).
• We use standard Siebel EAI technology to get data from / send it to Siebel so any logic in the SiebelBC layer remains in place. We supply standard workflows so all you need to do is declare the Integration Objects to use and the data is accessible to the OnTheMove UI. Because we have now decoupled the UI from the Siebel business layer, we can support any version of Siebel from 7.7 up and you don’t need to upgrade to have a great UX.
  
• OnTheMove installs onto the Siebel Web Server layer, so normally no extra infrastructure is required.
• As you would expect an OnTheMove for Siebel user is just a regular Siebel user so Siebel Visibility controls what data a user will see and regular Siebel Responsibilities control access to functionality. Translation is managed by Siebel Symbolic Strings.
• In mobile offline mode, there is an additional component available if you want to route data changes on the server to users’ devices in the background. For example, to alert a service engineer to a new job.

OnTheMove was originally built for Siebel, by Siebel experts, and is fastest, most supportable route to a great Siebel UX and great mobile access to Siebel. Obviously, we have just scratched the surface here, so do contact us if you have a question or book a no obligation techie to techie deep dive to the see the complete development life cycle in action.