Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Debugging Siebel eMail Response !!

In our Siebel application, we are using OOB functionality for creating Service Requests via emails, and yes I think you guessed it right we are using Siebel eMail Response workflows which are available in Siebel Tools and you just need to configure them as per your need and these works really well.

(For people who are new to this subject, to find these workflows you need to query in Siebel tools as "eMail Response*", and if you want to learn configure these, just follow the simple steps given in Communications Server Administration Guide)

I really like this OOB feature of Siebel as it works like a magic: user sends an email to Siebel email box whichever you have configured, Response Group keeps monitoring that and whenever see a new email just picks it up, delete it from the email box and invoke the Siebel Workflow. Now from here you can do anything what any workflow in Siebel is capable of doing, design your workflow as per the requirement and you are done.

Pretty simple isn't it, but sometimes it tough to debug it if you land-up in some issue here. I was working on the similar kind of requirement where everything seems working fine but the only problem was: "Response Group was not able to pick the email from Siebel email box".

Response Group only job is to just pick the email and create a MIME format file in "<_siebsrvr>/bin/incoming" folder and passes it as an input argument to eMail Response workflow, but since Response Group was not able to pick the email, so I thought of confirming whether it is reaching to the Siebel emailbox or not, so I logged into webmail client and found all emails keep lying there only.

Since I was able to see all the emails and I have also verified the username/password being used for the email profile in Siebel was correct, that means there is some problem with the POP3 setting of the emailbox. So to check it what you can do is :

a) Get the POP3 server name / username / password for the emailbox which is being monitored by reponse group. (You can find it in "Administration - Communications -> Communications Drivers and Profiles" view by querying for the communication drivers as "Internet SMTP/POP3 Server" and check the name in "Profile Parameter overrides" applet).

b) Click Start -> Run -> type "telnet <_servername> pop3", hit enter.

c) In Telnet window, type "USER <_username>" (without quotes)
if you see +OK, that means username is correct.

d) Type "PASS <_password>" (without quotes)
if you see +OK, that means password is correct.
But I recieved an error message saying "Unknown username or bad password"

So this is something we can't control from Siebel, I checked with the Server administration team who handles all the email servers and they fixed the issue for POP3 settings on the email box and tried the above steps again and this time no error.
[Server admin people really likes to resolve the issue when you go to them with the exact root cause ;) ]

One more reason I can think of for such a behaviour when you have not clicked on "Submit Response Group Changes" for the Response group monitoring the emailbox.
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11 comments:

  1. Good Explaination!! - Please include Checking Components of CIP/CIR are running, based on your setup you can check that comp. Some times this also will be the cause.

    -Manju

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  2. Thankyou for your comment Manjuprasad !! You are right we do require to confirm the CIP/CIR components running.

    For the information of other users, basically here we are referring a) Communication Inbound Processor (CIP) b) Communication Inbound Receiver (CIR). While debugging this issue, you also need to confirm that these components are running on the Siebel Server which plays an important role in Receiving/Processing Inbound emails.

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  3. Suddenly, in our development environment eMail Response stopped working and we hadn’t changed anything at our end. So, the fault in development was ruled out. As in Siebel we need to get logs to debug any kind of problem you need logs. So I went to
    * Administration – Server Configuration > Servers
    * Queried for Communication Inbound Receiver
    * Increased the log level for all this events to 4
    Then I went to log directory of Siebel Server installation through an FTP Client (this is probably the easiest way to get logs) and downloaded logs for Communication Inbound Receiver component. After going through logs I found the below given error again and again in logs.

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  4. Hi there... could you please let me know the error you are getting?

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  5. I activate all Email Response Workflows and Their Subprocess Workflows, but none is shown in Workflow Processes list. Do you know why?

    Thanks,
    James

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  6. Hi James,

    To see all the activated workflows, you need to navigate to "Administration- Business Process -> Workflow Deployment" view.

    Cheers
    Gaurav

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  7. Hi Gaurav
    Just have a query.For Email responses should lotus notes/microsoft exchange be the email servers or any free SMTP/pop3 servers wld do?? if yes which is the reliable free SMTP/pop3 server to goahead and configure?

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  8. No, it is not specific to any email server.
    You can even try configuring gmail pop, please refer the below link:
    http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13273

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  9. Hi
    The steps I followed were:
    In the communications drivers and profiles view I used:
    Smtp server name: smtp.gmail.com
    Smtp port: 587
    POP3 server name: pop.gmail.com
    POP3 port:995
    Enable SSL for SMTP:TRUE
    SMTP Account name:
    SMTP Account Password:
    Enabled POP for gmail,and tried to configure Outlook 2007 as my POP client
    Test was not successful.Following were the errors:
    Outlook cannot connect to your Incoming POP3 and outgoing SMTP server.
    And even I m unable to send mails using F9 functionality. The emails remain in the queued state.Has it got anything to do with the firewalls?I request you to give your insight on this.

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  10. Hi gaurav
    I was able to set up a mail server,load and launch campaign,and responses are being captured by the application too(response group monitoring a mail box).The responses are captured in the activities view tab of the contacts screen.The requirement here is campaign responses should be captured under responses view tab of campaign screen.Could you please let me know the configuration steps for this requirement.

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  11. Thanks it really helped us. We had the same problem on our production today. Followed the steps outlined and found the mailbox password was expired.

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