What I miss from Siebel 6.0

I know that this title makes some people shudder. Siebel 6.0, they say, is only perfect as a historical showpiece. I beg to differ, at least till the time required to complete this post. Sure, I agree that Siebel 7 revolutionized things around here. If something is not browser based, I would not be taking any bets on the application mortality. Nevertheless, this should no way undermine the beauty of v6.0 application.

Release in the year 2000, v6.0 aka Siebel 2000, brought in more stability and looked better than the earlier versions. Also significant was the concept of “integrated channel management” – one application to manage your sales, marketing and customer service across channels incl. web, wireless and call center. A few features mentioned below makes one fondly remember of v6.0:

• First and foremost aspect - the architecture, client-server worked like a charm. No IE, no fuss, no security concerns and no worrying about the next security patch killing everything except the manager. No worrying about different components that are at the mercy of different machines and operating systems
  
• Performance – Any Siebel 6.0 developer would laugh off performance testing and happily do some more customization
  
• Less network bandwidth – Everyone used local mode most of the time and everything ran on the local machine anyway. Even when you are connected to server you only need to ferry the data between application and db
  
• Deployment bandwidth – Deploy with zero downtime – of the local application that is. Take your own sweet time to bring up the server and let the users synchronize over the following week
  
• Usability – Responsive, access all available views through the menu (who says Sitemap is the right way?), an intuitive search and lesser screen refreshes – try navigating to the next set of records in a list
  
• Looks – Apply windows theme and change the application looks, customize it to work on VGA or revert to the way v99 looked. Also, show or hide gridlines, alternate row background colours and customize your tool bar (through options set at the individual level, not through Tools)
  
• Extendibility – You want anything not supported OOB? – just write some script, no worrying about server/browser scripting and the server-client round trips
  

Sure, there are not many points - v6.0 was no match for the "CEM" attitude of today. But for a time it did successfully held & expanded the forte of Siebel through the 'difficult' period for IT in the year 2000. All said, I have no love lost with the latest and greatest v8.0. After working on v6, albeit for a short time, I enjoyed the transition into the web & party model of 7 (& the accompanying hiccups - it generated lot of work :)), the robustness of 7.5, all the extras in 7.8 (still think it should have been the next BIG version of Siebel) and the user friendliness and wow-so-many-features that symbolises 8.0. And yes, all hail Fusion - I will be ready for it, whenever it comes!