As a part of our Siebel Upgrade project, we had to upgrade Siebel Actuate reports as well. As Siebel Actuate is not compatible with Siebel IP17 so we decided to move on BIP 12C.

There were certain reports on which client was using check boxes and based on certain condition and value these check boxes are being filled with 'X' sign. In the Actuate reports all these were working perfectly until we moved our reports from Actuate to BIP 12C.

We notice that all the check boxes started appearing as rhombus sign or diamond sign. We looked into the issue fixed by doing using Wingdings2 font. The steps to fix the issues are:

• Copy the Wingdings2.ttf file of your custom font (e.g. wingdings2.ttf) to the JRE home\fonts (e.g. C:\OraHome_1\jdk\jre\lib\fonts) folder on the BI Publisher Server

Log into the BI Publisher Server using the 'Administrator' login.

• Click on the 'Administration' tab. 
• Click on the 'Font Mappings' link under the 'Runtime Configurations' section on the right hand side. 
• Click on 'Add Font Mapping' button under the 'RTF Templates' section. 
• Set the following fields: 

Base Font - Wingdings
Style - Normal
Weight - Normal
Target Font Type - Truetype
Target Font - wingding2.ttf 

• Go the the following location of your BIP 12C installation:

C:\Oracle_Home\user_projects\domains\bip\bidata\components\bipublisher\repository\Admin\Configuration 

 Open the xdo.cfg file in textpad and add the entry:

<property name="rtf-checkbox-glyph">Wingdings2;0082;0163</property>

• Copy the font file wingdings2.ttf  to: $BIP_INSTAL_HOME\user_projects\domains\bifoundation_domain

<property name="rtf-checkbox-glyph">Wingdings2;0082;0163</property>

By going to "Administration" - > Parameters -> Characters Used for Checkbox,

One of the major problem and shortcoming with Siebel CRM was its browser dependence. That is, it was only used to work with IE. Moreover it was using ActiveX technology by Microsoft which is also now going to vanished.
Oracle lunched a major release of Siebel CRM called IP13 [ IP2013] and here for the first time Siebel was made browser independent. That is from IP13 onward now Siebel can be accessed on any modern browsers like Chrome, firefox etc including IE.
Oracle removed ActiveX technology and replaced it with a new custom framework called OpenUI. It is based on Javascript and CSS files. Just like for any modern website development, here now developer's can write javascript code to customize end user functionality like field validation, data manipulation at the browser end etc and can design and formate UI by using by customizing CSS files.
OpenUI enables Siebel CRM to be cloud ready, responsive and mobile friendly. Making UI level customization in Siebel are now as much possible as for with any other website.