So they made it! The end-of-year decorations are up, the tree is festively adorned with old Microsoft MSDN CD-ROMs (actually for those of you who have a garden, they make excellent bird scarers!) and my colleague Casey Cheng has just backed the truck full of Celebration Hooch up to the office door. But the Innovation Pack 2012 just made it, with about 20 days to go before the end of 2012. The Siebel CRM Open UI is here.

Of course there are lots of exciting things in this pack, including the BI Publisher support for the latest flavor. But let’s face it, for most people in the Siebel world this is the first chance to really get into the Open UI. Like everyone else, we have unpacked the 5 zip files, messed with the SNIC, watched Siebel Tools open and close 500 times, gotten frustrated as it tries to insert Arabic Symbolic Strings even though we asked for English United States and more.

For our first eLearning, rather than look into the technical stuff we decided to focus on the User Experience, walking through the kind of things we do every day in Siebel as End Users, and seeing the differences in the new, flashy (but not Flash-y) user interface. Later we will address the other points of view, but the User is King or Queen of our world. So watch the video learning segment for a taste of things to come.

If you prefer Youtube.

Vote to let us know how you think your own user population would react when faced with the Siebel CRM Open UI!