Benchmark of a Siebel OpenUI Theme from OpenUIThemes.com

In my previous post, I told you about the contact I had with the OpenUIThemes’ staff and said that a test was scheduled.

Well, yesterday, I could get my hands on their themes. My review below, I had access to their Gmail Theme and  every major topic I tested is listed here:

  Design
o   Being a daily user of Gmail as well as a global Google fan, I could feel the impression to work on my desktop using their test machine.

o   The UI is easy to navigate and the visuals are ok.

o   Some menus have changed position (like sitemap and so on) but as a user you don’t want to use this menu every day. In fact thinking again about it, I think that it adds something to user navigation as UI is focused on what will be immediately useful for the Siebel user.

 Performance
o   Performance was fine on this theme, the theme did not contain heavy images but I was on a low-bandwidth connection so for me it’s OK. I don’t know how it would behave with more and heavier visuals (high-definition logo of a company, etc...) but maybe high-bandwidth connection will compensate in this case.

o   Navigation is fluid between the pages and response time is also, even on first connection to the Siebel environment.

o   I didn’t try to make performance-costly operations specifically so I can only say that the UI performed well with basic operations and navigation.

 Compatibility
o   As you can imagine, this is my major concern (as I point out in some articles where I present webkit properties implementation for example), I try to draw attention on this point everytime I can when customizing the OpenUI.

o   So I tried with IE9, Chrome and Firefox (I don’t have Safari and Opera installed so I couldn’t test it with these browsers). They state on theme pages that they support Opera and Safari also but I can’t confirm that.

o   The result is same in 3 browsers I tried. Apparently, they took into account the difficulties to make customization depending on different browsers.

The theme I have tested is OK on design (depends on your taste actually), performance and compatibility as far as I could test it.

So this is a great news to see some companies going along with the OpenUI product expansion. Check it out yourself at http://www.openuithemes.com

Additional note:

Apparently, they also offer Plugins to modify the user experience.
They presented me 2 examples and also offered me to test it for free. They told me that other plugins are like I already did for voice recognition in Siebel OpenUI, mouse hover info, applets layouts changes and so on but I don’t know much more right now.

OpenUIThemes, a new company that creates themes for Siebel Open UI

Some days ago I received an email from a Company representative who wanted to introduce me to their concept around Siebel Open UI. Why not? I replied “Ok” and so I joined a video conference with the guy the next day.

Much to my surprise, they had decided to create packaged themes with various look & feel for Siebel Open UI to help other companies customize their Siebel CRM Open UI application.

The idea is very promising I think, as every company has corporate colors and branding that makes its visual identity.

I’ve seen in the past that it’s much easier to implement a new tool, make an upgrade to an existing tool and finally gain user adoption when the users feel that the software was made specifically for their company (visual identity, colors, display, etc… is part of it).

It also seems to go along with Oracle’s strategy with the Open UI (apart from the compatibility benefits).

Here is the URL: http://www.openuithemes.com

At the end of the video conference, I had a look at the code of one of their themes and they also offered me to test it… So I think I will!

Next post I will make a review of this test and share my thoughts.

Poll Result and Analysis

Results of the Poll Future of Siebel are out officially. @lex has collated and presented the analysis at this link. You can also catch up with the official press release here. The results have not taken many by storm but yet gave oxygen to the faith that there is no reason to panic and give up on Siebel. In the ever changing market dynamics, Siebel will continue to emerge with its architecture evolving and adapting to market needs.

With "Open UI" striking and more customers embracing it, its time to explore some Java skills. It also marks centuries of post on CRM Conundrum. Thanks to all readers/followers for making it success. Sooner or Later even you will be reading on piece of Open UI here till then stay tuned.

Happy Voting!!

UIF Calendar Control in MVG Applet

Recently while working on multilingual application we faced strange issue. While setting values in MVG applet with calendar control, any date value was getting appended with UIF_ string. As a result invalid format error was coming. Eagle-eye pursuit resulted in the fact that even on the calendar control the month was like "UIF_May". To our surprise this issue was not happening on all machines. It was occurring only in some of the user machines with specific configuration. On discussion with Oracle it is found to be product defect.
                                                           

With configuration of Windows 7 and IE 8, it happens in ARA/ENU/FRA implementations. In order to resolve the issue IE 8 must be updated to latest patches from Microsoft or as an alternate solution could be:

1. In the Internet Explorer browser, go to Tools > Compatibility view setting > Uncheck all the options.
2. Press F12 and set the Browser Mode value to IE8.

This will resolve the issue for while.  

Happy Crunching!!