WDCi Blogs

Following on from our recent blog on Salesforce - Netsuite - OpenAir integration.

What’s involved in testing an integration like this and how much time do you and your customer want to spend testing?.  If your integration takes 20 days to design and build, what %age of that time should you spend testing?  In our experience that depends on the following:

Process complexity:

• How complex are the integrations, are there any two-way or three-way synchronisations, ie are Customer details synchronised bi-directionally across applications.

Manual steps:

• Are there any manual steps to the process, these can introduce strange behaviours to the process if they are not followed correctly.

Application dependencies:

• What field incompatibilities could we encounter, i.e. by default Salesforce allows an Account name to be very long, whilst Netsuite only allows 40 characters.  Do we setup validations in the applications to handle this?  This is both a design and testing consideration.

Process dependencies:

• Are there sub-processes?  i.e. does an Invoice create require a Customer create and if so, what happens if one of the processes fail?

Operational dependencies:

• What volume is involved and can we simulate the volume in testing?
• Are there organisational factors at play that require immediate deployment?
• Are there budget and resource limitations?

Unfortunately there’s no formula, complexity, time and budget all comes into play.

We’ve recently built out an end-end process integrating Salesforce, Netsuite and OpenAir.

The end-end process goes like this:

• Successful Opportunities in Salesforce generate Sales Orders in Netsuite.  Opportunities of a specific type also generate Netsuite Projects and OpenAir projects.
• Payment updates are synchronised across from Netsuite to Salesforce, providing visibility to the sales team.
• Project updates are synchronised from OpenAir to Netsuite and Salesforce, providing visibility to finance as well as sales teams.
• Netsuite is the Item master and Item details are synchronised to Salesforce Products.
• When a Customer create is required in Netsuite (in order to generate a Sales Order) or OpenAir (for Project creation), the integration processes handles this as well.

End result:

• No re-keying of data for invoicing purposes
• The Services Team has instant visibility into new projects just sold by Sales
• Sales has visibility into payment status for their clients
• Sales has visibility into project delivery status for their clients
• Finance has visibility into project delivery status for invoicing and revenue recognition purposes

Complexity:

• There were some complexities with the customer’s Item/Product data
• Salesforce was enhanced with custom objects to store the invoicing and project data and link that to the original opportunity
• The main challenge was bring the parties together and defining the business process flow

Want to know more, just contact us for the details.

Dynamics AX integration may seem like a daunting task. Suppose that you have a SaaS based Sales Automation tool like Salesforce, or a CRM system like Netsuite or RightNow. Integration in real or near real time to your AX Financial system could provide huge benefit to your business.

WDCi have recently integrated to Dynamics AX using Boomi technology and a web Services connector that we created for the task. Integration of Accounts, Contacts, Sales Orders etc is certainly possible, and within reach of SME clients, not just Large Enterprise.

If you would like more information contact us at WDCi

See the following job adv for more information:

http://siva-my.jobstreet.com/_ads/my/jobs/2011/2/default/10/1236585.htm

You can apply through JobStreet or directly email us at careers@wdcigroup.net

Check out http://cazoomi.com/comparison-chart/ - it lists all the main features of most of the major players.  Worth a look for sure.

StorageCraft required a custom solution to integrate their unique sales and distribution model in Salesforce to their Quickbooks accounting package.

They knew their requirements didn’t fit anything out-of-the-box but they didn’t want a complex project with a matching price tag either.

The solution provided for the automatic sync of Products and Accounts plus Invoice creation from Opportunities.

This rapid solution has freed them up from hours of manual processing.  For more details check out the case study.

Thanks to Richard, Claire and the StorageCraft team for working with us to make this a success.

Hear Amrith Nambiar from Mindjet talk about running integration in a 100% cloud environment and Bill Vanderwall from Scientific Learning on integrating in a hybrid cloud and on-premise environment:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVwXftgNgI
  

Some interesting take aways:

• Nate Bride talks about the Boomi community approach and gives a plug to the WDCi built JIRA connector that is available via the Boomi public atomsphere - thanks Nate.
• Bill talks about selecting Boomi over Cast Iron due to the user interface but most importantly due to the Total Cost of Ownership - Boomi is more affordable.
• Both Bill and Amrith talk about the complexity of bidirectional integration of data, ie which system is the master and how to ensure data integrity in this model.

• Amrith’s 4 keys to success:

1. Focus on the business process.
2. Limit your scope to only what systems are needed for your first project.
3. Get the right partner (thanks Amrith).
4. Accept that the interfaces/integration processes will be tuned over time -  don’t expect to build out everything in the first phase if you have complex or dependent business processes.

• Amrith mentions the custom reporting and error handling infrastructure we have put in place to enable Mindjet to check and validate synchronised data between Salesforce and Netsuite.
• At the end of the recording, you can hear Walter Dewildt from WDCi answer a question on how to decide if you should push volumes of data to your target application or simply expose data in the source and retrieve as necessary.

Want to know more, check out the Mindjet case study http://www.boomi.com/customers/success/standardizing-back-office-application-integrations-minimal-it-support

If you are, then you no doubt have encountered the security team of your company. If you are small enough to not have a security team, then you probably can get by with opening some firewall ports, but otherwise you may be in for a long wait, and a few lively discussions.

Typically,  security teams do not like to trust “SaaS platforms” and open up firewall ports for inbound connections.

A common problem I see is that while even the most flexible organisations may have infrastructure to deal with this in a secured zone like UAT or Production, most of us have development servers on our internal domain, and getting that opened through the firewall for inbound services is very unlikely to happen. If it does it will most likely require expensive services and additional routers ensure the path through is secured.

So how can you get around this issue?  Dell-Boomi the leader in SaaS integration has a neat solution. Outbound connections and webServices are a dime a dozen, and when they happen through a regular port (443 outbound) then they are simple.

What if you could get a platform like Salesforce.com or Rightnow or Netsuite to call an internal service, that  was proxied  through a firewall friendly connection.  E.G. a Salesforce.com sandbox calling an internal service running on your Dev server without opening a firewall port, all secured by an enterprise ready integration platform.

This is available today, and probably at a fraction of the cost and effort to get your security team involved in opening firewall ports.

if you want to know more, come talk to us at WDCi. We can help you get set up in days, not weeks.

You’ve probably read the news re Dell acquires Boomi.

Big congratulations to the Boomi guys and we look forward to a new era in SaaS integration.  More news to come, in the meantime it’s business as usual for us and our customers.

Time to move as we grow our team in KL.

We have moved to a new office in Cyberjaya in the MDEC SME Building 1.  Here’s a photo of the outside of the office, nice hey: