Thursday 20 June 2013

Benchmark of a Siebel OpenUI Theme from OpenUIThemes.com

In my previous post, I told you about the contact I had with the OpenUIThemes’ staff and said that a test was scheduled.

Well, yesterday, I could get my hands on their themes. My review below, I had access to their Gmail Theme and  every major topic I tested is listed here:

  Design
o   Being a daily user of Gmail as well as a global Google fan, I could feel the impression to work on my desktop using their test machine.

o   The UI is easy to navigate and the visuals are ok.

o   Some menus have changed position (like sitemap and so on) but as a user you don’t want to use this menu every day. In fact thinking again about it, I think that it adds something to user navigation as UI is focused on what will be immediately useful for the Siebel user.

 Performance
o   Performance was fine on this theme, the theme did not contain heavy images but I was on a low-bandwidth connection so for me it’s OK. I don’t know how it would behave with more and heavier visuals (high-definition logo of a company, etc...) but maybe high-bandwidth connection will compensate in this case.

o   Navigation is fluid between the pages and response time is also, even on first connection to the Siebel environment.

o   I didn’t try to make performance-costly operations specifically so I can only say that the UI performed well with basic operations and navigation.

 Compatibility
o   As you can imagine, this is my major concern (as I point out in some articles where I present webkit properties implementation for example), I try to draw attention on this point everytime I can when customizing the OpenUI.

o   So I tried with IE9, Chrome and Firefox (I don’t have Safari and Opera installed so I couldn’t test it with these browsers). They state on theme pages that they support Opera and Safari also but I can’t confirm that.

o   The result is same in 3 browsers I tried. Apparently, they took into account the difficulties to make customization depending on different browsers.

The theme I have tested is OK on design (depends on your taste actually), performance and compatibility as far as I could test it.

So this is a great news to see some companies going along with the OpenUI product expansion. Check it out yourself at http://www.openuithemes.com


Additional note:

Apparently, they also offer Plugins to modify the user experience.
They presented me 2 examples and also offered me to test it for free. They told me that other plugins are like I already did for voice recognition in Siebel OpenUI, mouse hover info, applets layouts changes and so on but I don’t know much more right now.

16 comments :

  1. Hi,
    I'm working on openUI too, and i tried to do some personalization at the theme by myself.

    Now I'm investigating some issues on the standard theme with IE9:
    1. rendering of check box. when they are read only, the background is white (not gray) and it is possible to mark the check, but the change is not saved
    2. on openUI the text area field are missing. on Chrome it is possible to enlarge a text area field, on IE9 no

    do you have some hints?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Giorgio,
    I just went through your issue. I could not reproduce that check box issue. I will explore more screens and let you know. Then the next issue is background is white. You can easily alter the color by adding some physical renderer file. You can catch the read only field with readonly="readonly" property. So you can override any property to that read only field.
    2. Usually IE does not supporting resizing. But some custom JavaScript libraries are available with this feature. End users may not be happy with small textarea field. So giving HTML hight & width property in Tools is a small solution.

    I will work something on this and let you know, if i found something.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Prasanth,

      Did you get any solution for resizing text area in IE 10 or pop up text area box like it used to work in HI clients.

      Regards,

      Delete
    2. Hi,
      We can implement this feature by using PR

      Delete
  3. We have a seemingly simple query but we are having hard time in finding a proper solution. Hope you can help here.


    1) We have a custom theme 'Blue Theme' (made a new theme, set of css files and used the theme.js in custom folder).

    2) We have set up the LOV for nav control and theme (Tree and 'Blue Theme' respectively).

    3) Every user that logs into the application should by default see 'Blue Theme'. The users shouldn't have to pick up 'Blue Theme' from User Preference > Behavior but 'Blue Theme' should be default.

    4) Only good approach we found was to predefault theme and Nav control fields in User Preference BC. But this hit us back when mobile open UI stopped working because of this predefault.



    Do you suggest any good way for doing this.

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  4. Few more details for the above issue

    Some more of our observations

    1) If neither Nav Contol or Theme (both are not filled or either one of them is not filled) in Behavior, instead of using theme.js in custom folder Open UI always uses theme.js in Siebel folder (which has GRAY_TAB on top). Hence GRAY_TAB is the default.

    2) If both Nav Control and Theme are filled then theme.js in custom folder comes into effect. Since both are mentioned sequence of the theme in the file does not matter at all.

    3) Our scenario is to leave both blank which means Open UI picks up theme.js from Siebel folder. Hence loads GRAY_TAB.


    We also tried modifying theme.js in Siebel folder (as last resort; put custom theme on top in Siebel theme.js). What we observed was no matter what, Tab Navigation control defaults. Tree control needs explicit mention in the Navigation Control field. Since our theme is Tree based the css were picked up correctly but left side navigation completely failed (Siebel loaded the Tab control instead of Tree).


    Predefaulting at User Preference BC worked but somehow Open UI mobile does not like any value in Nav Control and Theme. Mobile Application completely failed to launch because of this.

    Any help will be much appreciated.

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi Prasanth,

    I don't see any navigation control or Theme control under - under User Preference - Behaviour view.These will come by default with the installation..?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Which version you are using? you must import and compile the SIFs available with Fix Pack...otherwise you will not get those views.

      Delete
    2. Hi Prasanth..i'm using 8.1.1.10 version...
      can you please help me if any fix pack i need to apply

      Delete
    3. Hi Prasanth..i'm using siebel 8.1.1.10 version..
      not seeing Navigation control or Theme Control under User preference->Behaviour.
      can you please let me know if i need to import any fix pack

      Delete
    4. i can go to that view but controls are not exists

      Delete
    5. Did you apply SIFs comes with patch??

      Delete
  6. No...i don't any idea about that..

    ReplyDelete
  7. No...i don't have any idea about that..can you please help me on this

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Raj,
      Please read
      http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.in/2013/04/a-closer-look-at-siebel-incremental.html

      Delete
  8. Hey Prasanth, Can we show MVG values when we hover the mouse on a MVG field?

    ReplyDelete