You are at the end of the book. Congratulations! However, you may have just begun with a steep learning path. In order to ease the mission of finding additional information about Siebel CRM, this appendix provides the following information:
Getting trained
Finding information
Please note that the internet addresses in this chapter have been thoroughly revised at the time of writing this book. Given the nature of the internet, they could have changed in the meantime.
The success of a Siebel CRM project, or any standard software implementation project in general, is linked to the education of the professionals who undertake it. Complex systems like Siebel CRM will not reveal their intricate patterns to naive consultants (or their managers) who believe in self-study or fast-track trainings.
The money saved on training (or no training) will be spent equally fast on project delay. It is paramount for the Siebel professional to expose him or herself to high quality instructor-led training, which is provided for example by Oracle University and its training partners throughout the world.
The following website addresses shall serve as an entry point for your personal training plan.
Oracle University: http://education.oracle.com
Oracle Partner Network: http://opn.oracle.com
Oracle Technology Network: http://otn.oracle.com
Siebel CRM has been developed under the assumption that customers will employ their own technicians or hire external consultants to install, configure, and manage the software. Documenting the necessary steps to do so and also providing information about the features of Siebel CRM has evolved into what is known today as the Siebel Bookshelf.
Oracle has made the entire Siebel documentation available on its web servers. We can access the documentation library for each version from Siebel 6 and above online or download it from the following internet address: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/siebel-087898.html.
Before we start downloading and installing Siebel CRM, we should ensure that we have read and digested the information given to us by the technical writers at Oracle. The following is a list of recommended Bookshelf guides for the ambitious newbie:
Deployment Planning Guide
Developing and Deploying Siebel Business Applications
Fundamentals
Going Live with Siebel Business Applications
Installation Guide (for your operating system)
Overview: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration
System Administration Guide
Not every trick, bug, or workaround can be found in the official Siebel documentation. While you are reading these lines, somebody encounters a problem or explores some functionality within Siebel CRM. Many Siebel professionals use the Oracle Forums to post questions and findings. Experienced consultants pick up the posts and answer them, so the community has a great place to search for information outside the official documentation.
We can access the Oracle Forums at http://forums.oracle.com.
Customers, partners, and employees of Oracle have access to the Oracle support system, which not only allows creation of service requests, but also searching of the knowledge base of resolved service requests, bulletins, and other documents.
My Oracle Support is a centralized portal for all Oracle products and can be accessed via the URL http://support.oracle.com.
Various channels exist to share findings and knowledge on the internet. Over the past few years, many IT professionals decided to create their own websites, weblogs, or Twitter channels to distribute information on Siebel CRM.
A good starting point for our research in this vast amount of information may be Google's blog search: http://blogsearch.google.com.
The author's blog on Siebel CRM and Oracle Business Intelligence can be found at http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.com.
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