Customizing iSupport for DELL

It was in year 2003, one of my first consulting projects, when I was asked to be at the DELL, HQ in Austin for a project involving Oracle Service and iSupport. A great project from what I comprehended, since it was for DELL a multi-billion dollar multi-national company. All the ground work of the look and feel were done in the form of HTML templates.

Since I was given the charge of using the HTML templates as is, I did not have an option but to use my knowledge of the backend Oracle Service module. iSupport is the online version of the Oracle Service module where in customers can log Service Requests online and this will be updated by Oracle Service (or Customer Support) modules in the backend by a CSR. So, DELL’s requirement was a completely customized online version of iSupport. This truely did not call for iSupport implementation because Oracle’s iSupport is not a custmizable product and mainly due to the reason that the display is rendered via http calls embedded in the PL/SQL APIs, which is called by Java wrappers from the iSupport JSP pages. You can very well understand the complexity involved in customizing a page, for eg. you would like to change the name of a field or add a new field. Honestly, I did not find an easier way to do this unless one sets out to write their own HTML templates and write ones own APIs to take care of Creating, Updating or View Service Requests.

Even after all the constraints I was able to come up with a working version of customized iSupport, using the same HTML templates that DELL provided and this was done in a short span of just 2 months. This was even demonstrated by DELL to the Oracle Product Management team managing iSupport development and they were impressed by this effort.

Email me at support@ibizsoftinc.com if you would like me to share some good ideas on customizing Oracle iSupport.