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Aprimo has a sophisticated data model to handle Digital Asset. You can retrieve from the API directly. Before you do that, you should understand the following data structure:

Activity

Each activity can have one or more digital asset. You can add an existing digital asset or promote from existing attachment.

AssetVersion

Each digital asset can have multiple versions. You probably are interested with the current used version only.

AssetRendition

Each version can have multiple renditions. Based on your requirements, you can filter rendition by its name.

FileStream

Each rendition is associated with one file stream. That is where the base64 encoded data is saved.

If you need assistance in Aprimo integration, please feel free to contact us.

There are ways to extract data like total sales from MYOB (Database) and generate this data into useful information for the company. Here is one of the ways.

First, we may need to query all the sales data from MYOB by filtering them by type of invoice.

The next step, we can sum up the total amount of all these invoices of this type (credit). By doing this, it will return you the total account receivable.

In addition, we can acquire the sum of the overdue invoices from data mentioned above. In order to achieve this, we will have to compare each of the invoices by their due dates to the current date.

In order to access Magento web services API, you will need to do the following:

1. Log in with a username and API key. This username is not the same as the username that you used to log in to the admin backend of the store. You will need to create an API user and role assigned to this user in Admin panel.
2. Upon successful login, it would then return a session ID (security token). The session ID is mandatory in every API call request. Unlike other security tokens, there will be session timeout and this session ID would be expired automatically in a period of time. Once the session ID is expired, you will not be able to perform any API call request, and you will have to perform log in again to get a new session ID.

Notes:
Magento only accepts the latest and only one session ID to be used in the API call. Therefore, if there are more than one user trying to access the API, it is a good practise to have only one session ID at a time and be shared among the users until this session ID is expired.

The following are the steps to setup a new API user from Magento’s backend admin.

Step 1:
Create an API user’s role under the admin panel, System->Web Services->Roles

Step 2:
Press “Add New Role” button to create a role for an API user.

Step 3:
Under “Role Info”, create a role’s name.

Step 4:
Under “Role Resources”, set permissions or restrictions for the user to access certain levels of data. Either select “All” or “Custom” for accessing the resources.

Step 5:
Create API user under the admin panel, System->Web Services->Users

Step 6:
Press “Add New User”.

Step 7:
Create an user account by filling up all the required field.

Note: Account must be set to “Active” in order for this user to access the API.

Step 8:
Select the user role for the user.

Finally, the API user is created.

Note: User can create one or more API user(s) and role(s).

Volusion has an interesting API. It allows you to somehow perform a “SQL query” in the URL. For example, if I want to query customer with the following SQL:

SELECT CustomerID,BillingAddress1,City,CompanyName FROM Customer WHERE CompanyName=’WDCi’

I can achieve it with the following URL:

http://<volusion_url>/net/WebService.aspx?Login=<login>&EncryptedPassword=<encrypted_password>&EDI_Name=Generic\Customers&SELECT_Columns=CustomerID,BillingAddress1,City,CompanyName&WHERE_Column=CompanyName&WHERE_Value=WDCi

Dell Boomi has just launched a certification program for their partners.  If you’re asking yourself is this an attempt at shameless self promotion, you’re right, WDCi is one of the first certified partners.  Boomi announced the list of initial certified partners in their Spring Product Release announcement.

Details on the certification program can be found here: http://help.boomi.com/display/BOD/AtomSphere+Certification+Program.

Magento has a different data model for customer. It’s more like a ‘contact’ centric system then an ‘account’ centric system. It treats all customer as an individual instead of a company.

If you are integrating Magento with Salesforce, perhaps you should consider the Person Account feature. It would be the good fit for the design.

If you really have to get the company information from Magento customer, you can get it from the address object. One Magento customer can have more than one addresses. Designing how the data synchronised between two different data set is crucial.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested to know more.

Magento supports a few product types. Each product type has different behavior. This is important when you design the product synchronisation process.

For example, if you are integrating Salesforce and Magento in the following scenario:

Magento Order > Creates > Salesforce Opportunity

If one of the order line items is a bundle product, you may get more than one line item returned from the API.

Order item from UI

XML data from API

The bundle product and all the associated items will be listed in the API. It is important to filter the list before you push it to Salesforce.

Need to integrate some systems for your business?  Not sure how much it will cost or where to start?

Our integration planning guide has some information on how to plan your integration.  Maybe you want to get a quote before you plan, to determine your ROI and decide if you want to take it further.

How do you go about that?  What information do you need to provide a company like WDCi to enable them to give you a quote for your integration?

The key is in describing your use-case(s) and your business objective(s).

Here are some simple tips:

1. Describe your business process that you want automated - avoid any technical ideas or data level detail (that can come later).  Some simple business processes (use-cases) might be:

• When I change my Sales Opportunity to closed/won, I’d like an invoice to be created automatically in my financial system. When the invoice is paid, I’d like visibility of that payment in my sales system OR
• When I add certain tasks to my projects (in my project management system), I’d like these tasks to generate bug issues in my issue tracking system.  When the bugs are updated or completed, I’d like those updates to be reflected back in the project management tool - providing visibility to the PM. OR
• I need to synchronise my Customer data across our CRM, ERP and Sales Automation systems.  When a Customer is updated in one of them, I want that information to be reflected in the other two systems.

2. If you understand the process flow and sequence of events, draw that up, it will help you flesh out how it really works.  Your drawing could be just a few simple boxes and arrows, as long as it describes the flow you expect.   If you don’t understand the flow, focus on the high level detail of describing the process in plain language.

3. Identify the systems you want integrated, what version are you running?

4. Contact us

If you focus on the applications involved and the business process you want to automate between these applications - we’ll take it from there, work with you and provide a quick quote for your review.

If you’ve been a booth babe before, you’ll know how long the day can be, so if you’re in Sydney on May the 12th, call into Cloudforce, stop by our booth and say hello http://bit.ly/h3RyZQ.

Check out our new we did here:

http://wdcigroup.net/wedidintegration_salesforcenetsuiteopenair.html

This new integration involved 3 endpoints. (Salesforce, OpenAir and Netsuite)