Posted by vesapalmu on October 6, 2008 at 7:33am
Is anyone else working with Drupal - Siebel integrations? I am currently working on a integration project and would love to share experiences if anyone else is working on this.
Anyone working with Siebel integration?
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Siebel integrations
Hi Wesku,
I have just been given a requirement to integrate siebel with a drupal site and was wondering if you make any progress with this at all?
Regards,
Luke Hamilton
Progress with Siebel integration
Yes sir, we have indeed made quite a lot of progress. We ended up doing most of the integration with SOAP, since that is very easy to support on Siebel end of things. SOAP means just a bit more work at Drupal end, but it's still easier than trying to use any other protocol.
All our interfaces are one way, meaning only Drupal contacts Siebel, never the other way around. Our Drupal sites are 24/7, but Siebel might have some random administrative downtime, so we implemented most interfaces in a way that they fire right away and fall back to cron queue if Siebel can't be succesfully contacted. We are still testing most interfaces, but so far it looks very promising.
How about you, which path did you choose?
Any Siebel Success Stories?
I'm curious what the outcome of these projects was, or what was necessary to make this work.
I'm currently working for a nonprofit with a large Siebel database & a hand-coded site in ASP with all non-CRM data static. I'm trying to propose that we put everything in a database(s) and use a CMS to streamline our development workflow. Our business model relies heavily on sales (which includes extensive product, user, & e-commerce management - currently through a home-grown system), so Siebel integration is absolutely necessary.
Is it possible to use an existing database in Siebel to power a new Drupal site? We can rewrite all of our web data (non- product or customer info) into the database how we want, but existing customer & product data needs to remain as is in Siebel/Oracle.
IT told me our current process is to write directly to Siebel & read directly from Oracle, the reason being that Siebel will only recognize data (in realtime, as is necessary) written through it's interface, not Oracle. How does this affect the project?
Sorry I'm a bit naive about all this, it seems there's very little written about it, and I'm fighting an uphill battle just trying to explain the benefits of a CMS.
Should be possible
While it will not be possible to power a drupal site from siebel db but should be possible to connect siebel and drupal. From what I understand siebel allows interaction with third party apps via SOAP interface. So you need to get hold of WSDL files and write custom module to write data into siebel. As for the importing data from siebel, you will have to write a custom module and run it via cron, to periodically pull data. You can import users, user profiles etc.
regards
Vivek
Somewhat painful, but can be done
You can do all of this with Siebel web services (SOAP). It is however going require some considerable effort and do not expect to get stellar performance out of this setup.
What you need to do is to configure Siebel web services first and then either use Drupal services module or write some custom code for this. Reading and even updating stuff directly from database is also possible but not officially supported by Oracle. Updates can also be very tricky to do so I would stick to reading only if SOAP based web services are not enough for some reason.
We implemented a setup where all customer data is in Siebel and can be displayed or updated from Drupal. Even user roles are read from Siebel based on custom rules. We read and update customer training information and accounts using Drupal based web site.
Any plans to post the code for your Siebel work?
@wesku sounds like you did a decent integration over SOAP. Any plans on posting the code as a module or sandbox project for others to benefit?
Chris Brookins, VP Engineering and Product Management, Acquia
Get a free Drupal 7 site at http://DrupalGardens.com
Drupal - Siebel integration module
We originally considered contributing some code for this, but it's far from generic. You can integrate anything to anything and with exception of PHP SOAP libraries there really isn't much to post. Siebel is just as flexible and complex as Drupal and generic integration to one instance would not work on another. Doing "out-of-the-box" integrations between these two would be great for other people to learn from, but it would take months of work and potential audience would be limited to very few people.
I will have another look at our work to see if there would be anything to publish. We learned a lot while doing this and it was a challenging project. At least I will try to get somebody from our team to do a blog post (http://mearra.com/blog) on lessons learned.
Integrating Enterprise Applications like SAP,Siebel with Drupal
Hi,
I have a decade of experience in SAP particularly SAP CRM, Siebel and now with Drupal Application Development. If any one has requirement in integrating enterprise applications or migration I am willing to provide my Knowledge & Skills.
wesku, sekumar thanks for the feedback
Very interested in reading any blog posts you may post.
I may need to reach out and pick your brains more in the coming weeks.
Chris Brookins, VP Engineering and Product Management, Acquia
Get a free Drupal 7 site at http://DrupalGardens.com