Siebel – Vanilla Functionality

What is Siebel Vanilla functionality?

Somebody recently asked me this question. Though trivial, it could be quite foxing for somebody new to the Siebel Development community. It is a part of the normal Siebel jargon.

In plain and simple words, anything Out-of-the-box (OOB) functionality is called Siebel Vanilla. Let me explain.

Siebel is more like a Development Tool than a Development Platform (just face it, it’s the truth!). From amongst the basic strengths of Siebel CRM are:
1) Beautiful Interface, at the same time, easy to use.
2) Strong adherence to global Best Practices in the Functional Processes implemented.
3) Large amount of OOB functionalities, which generally suffice for most of the Business Processes in each vertical.

Let’s take, for example, a Telco. If we use Siebel eCommunications vertical for it, what do you guess will be the Business Entities for the run-of-the mill Business Processes. They could be:
Products
Building Price Lists
Building Catalogues
Campaigns
Opportunity Management
Order Management, etc.

All the above are handled by the Siebel OOB Processes. Thus, are part of Siebel Vanilla.

My guess would be that the term ‘vanilla’ takes its name from the ice-cream flavours, vanilla, strawberry, Manhattan Mania, Tutty-fruity and the like.

If you like it plain and simple, it’s vanilla. If you customize it, or add a flavour from your own business to it, it’s a different flavour, more like strawberry, Kesar Pista, Manhattan Mania or the Tutty-fruity. Most of the times, Siebel Consultants would like to roll out an application as close to vanilla as possible.

However, in practice, that is rarely the case!

Source: http://geeksbloggingat.com/2009/08/11/siebel-vanilla-functionality/

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