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The overall process of planning and preparation can be described as follows. The following flowchart describes the major steps of the process of planning and preparing a Siebel CRM installation. In this article, we will describe each step in detail.

Planning the Siebel CRM installation

Implementing Siebel CRM for thousands of users in corporations that do business across the globe is not something a single person would do on a single day. Sometimes, hundreds of technicians, IT architects and business analysts are involved to fulfil the company’s requirements. Siebel CRM projects can be costly, lengthy, and sometimes risky expeditions into rough terrain.

In a typical Siebel CRM project, people from various companies—integrators and IT staff of the customer—work together to install and set up the different Siebel environments from first prototyping areas over the development, test, and training environments, to the final production environment.

Siebel and third-party software for these environments are typically installed on multiple server machines and it is not unusual to find a mix of operating systems.

What is expected from us—being the reliable and trustworthy expert that the customer hired to install Siebel CRM on their systems—is a planning document. The key to a useful planning document is knowledge about the customer’s IT infrastructure, as well as the Siebel installation and configuration processes.

The following is an example of a typical planning document that provides all the information that is needed to successfully install the Siebel CRM infrastructure on Microsoft Windows machines. The official Siebel Installation Guide includes a Deployment Planning Worksheet, which can serve as a starting point. In a real life project, we can use any spreadsheet application to create and collaborate on this information.

Sample planning document

The following table is a sample planning document for information regarding the relational database management system (RDBMS) to host the Siebel database. We record information about the RDBMS vendor and version as well as the machine hostname and administrative user account. For a typical Siebel CRM installation, we also plan the creation of two tablespaces. Details on how to create tablespaces and undertake other prerequisite installation steps are described later in this article.

More planning information

Of course, a decent planning document contains more than just a series of tables. Sometimes, we might need to bring specialists on board to define the necessary amount of servers, the hardware configuration, and so forth.

Security-related information such as user accounts, remote access settings, or simply the phone numbers of the firewall administrators, can help the project team to finish a Siebel CRM infrastructure provisioning on time.

Certainly, the project plan will include a timeline. We will not go into details of project management, but we should ensure that our project plan provides enough time and money for training—for both technicians and the end user community.

Understanding hardware and software prerequisites

Many problems in Siebel CRM projects arise from improper planning. As we learned, delivering a decent planning document is a key milestone of our Siebel CRM implementation project.

Therefore, it is very important that any person involved in planning and conducting a Siebel CRM installation has access to the Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms document that can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network website: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11886_01/srsphomepage.html.

This document is available for each individual Siebel CRM version and outlines in detail the minimum hardware requirements and software prerequisites.

For example, if we plan to provide a prototype environment for evaluation and testing of Siebel CRM 8.1 and would like to use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 as the operating system, we would have to provision hardware and software as follows:

If we were to install these components on a single piece of hardware, we would have to provision a 4 CPU unit (2 for the Siebel Server, 1 for the Siebel Gateway Name Server, and 1 for the Web Server) with at least 1.7 GB (1 GB plus 256 MB + 512 MB) of free memory for the Siebel components, which would be a physical minimum of 2 GB of memory as the operating system will also be hungry for memory.

Sizing the Siebel deployment

Installing Siebel CRM for personal evaluation or prototyping is one thing, providing a stable and high performing enterprise application to hundreds or thousands of end users is quite another challenge.

In certain phases of the Siebel CRM implementation project, consultants and IT staff will have to deliver a sizing document that provides insight into the expected number of end users and their concurrent sessions.

The necessary amount of hardware units and software components is dependent on these main factors:

• Maximum number of concurrent user sessions
• Expected volume of data and indexes
• Hardware vendor
• Operating system type
• Database vendor
• Network bandwidth
• High-availability and failover requirements

Each of these has to be considered and evaluated. Customers typically rely on the services of experienced staff from either Oracle or consulting corporations to accomplish this.