Understanding Siebel Upgrade Process

Before pursuing an upgrade, it is imperative that you fully understand the upgrade process, potential upgrade paths, and most importantly, your criteria for considering an upgrade of your Siebel CRM solution.

Upgrade project is similiar to an implementation project which begin with an Upgrade Assessment and project definition, and continue through testing, deployment and training activities.

Following steps are well documented in 'Best practices for Siebel Upgrade' which could be downloaded from 'My Oracle Support':

1. Perform Upgrade Assessment and Planning

This phase includes a granular assessment of the technical complexity of your Siebel CRM upgrade, and an estimate of resources required for the upgrade.

The Upgrade Assessment should achieve the following objectives:

 a) Assess the current Siebel CRM environment

 b) Analyze new product functionality

 c) Evaluate the complexity of the upgrade

 d) Estimate the level of effort to upgrade

 e) Assess business processes, functional redesign, and current requirements versus obsolete requirements that may be out of scope

 f) Recommend upgrade team roles

 g) Review interface migration tasks

 h) Plan for upgrade tuning

 i) Identify data migration tasks

 j) Provide logical end-user training recommendations
2. Upgrade the Infrastructure

The first phase of the actual project is to upgrade your hardware and software to meet system and implementation requirements, which includes upgrading the Siebel Enterprise to the new release. This action upgrades the Siebel servers and provides the programs, scripts, input files, and other files required to merge the repository and upgrade the Siebel database.

3. Perform Pre-Upgrade Tasks

This upgrade project phase prepares the Siebel database for upgrade and includes such tasks as closing database connections, clearing pending workflow tasks, and disabling customized triggers

4. Perform Upgrade Tasks

This phase of the upgrade cycle merges your customizations into the new release. You must always plan upgrading you development environment before upgrading test and production environment. Steps like Repository 'Repository Merge' and 'Post-Merge Activities' must be considered while upgrading development environemnt. The ouputs from these steps could directly be used as inputs for test and production upgrade process. This portion of the effort also upgrades the development environment database and includes these tasks:

 4a. Prepare application data. These tasks prepare test data for migration. 4b. Involves running the Database Server Configuration Utility in "upgrep" mode. This utility performs a basic upgrade of the Siebel database schema  and loads repositories to prepare for the repository merge.Upgrade Siebel database schema (upgrep).

 4c Merge repository (Development Environment only). Leverage Siebel Tools to merge your current repository with the repository in the new release. Postmerge utilities upgrade form applets and verify that applets and views are configured correctly.

Run postmerge utilities (Development Environment only) Leverage Siebel Tools to run a set of utilities that examine the merged repository. The utilities analyze any customizations and apply changes to them as needed to conform to the user interface in the new release.

 4d

4e Upgrade Siebel custom database schema (upgphys). Involves applying the Database Server Configuration Utility in "upgphys" mode. This step further upgrades the Siebel database with changes resulting from the repository merge and completes the database upgrade. The Database Server Configuration Utility also generates the "customer repository" definition file and logical schema definition file that are used as input to the production test environment and production upgrades.

5. Perform Post-Upgrade Tasks

During this upgrade phase, the environments are set up, applications are configured, and the system is tested as follows:

5a. Set up the environment. These tasks set up the post-upgrade environment, which includes extracting the developer's databases and running database statistics.

5b. Application administration. These tasks set up applications and include such things as setting up user access and visibility of views and screens.

5c. Application configuration. These tasks prepare applications for testing, including data migration for specific applications.

5d.  Test the system. For development environment upgrades, you perform basic unit tests to verify application function. For production test environment upgrades, you should perform a full suite of regression and stress tests to verify the system is ready for production.

6. Upgrade the Test Environment
Your test environment should exactly be a copy of production environment. It is extremely important that the upgraded release be tested to validate its function and performance before deploying it to users. In addition, the upgrade process must be tuned to minimize the time required to perform the production upgrade and optimize the environment for improved performance at deployment
7.Upgrade the Production Environment

The production environment is your live, deployed business instance running on the new Siebel CRM release, where your internal and external users interact with the Siebel CRM applications and generate actual business data

Hope this helps....