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.

You can find a complete sample planning document in the appendix section of this book.

Note

For the sake of example and simplicity, passwords in the sample document are written in clear text. In a real life project, we must ensure that no sensitive information is included in the document. Rather, we can use common encryption tools to secure the information or leave references in the planning document to where the information is.