WDCi Blogs

Check out our Integration Planning guide, it’s simple and should help you get going.

The first problem that we had while integrating MYOB with another system was importing multiple Cards with the same name into MYOB as different Cards.

In the standard MYOB interface, it allows you to create two new Cards with the same name. However, this is retricted when the cards are created via the ODBC import function. For example:

insert into import_customer_cards (CoLastName, FirstName, InvoiceDelivery)
values ((’Andy’, ‘Cole’, ‘B’), (’Andy’, ‘Cole’, ‘P’))

This import statement will only create one Card “Andy, Cole”. The reason being is that MYOB will create a new card “Andy, Cole” using the first “value” and update the same card again using the second “value”. This is not ideal if we happen to have two customers that have the same name.

To fix this issue, we needed to add the “CardId” field to the import statement as an unique identifier for the cards. For example:

insert into import_customer_cards (CoLastName, FirstName, InvoiceDelivery, CardId)
values ((’Andy’, ‘Cole’, ‘B’, ”), (’Andy’, ‘Cole’, ‘P’, ‘0001′))

Good blog on what to look out for when building/updating your API .  Article by Rick Nucci @ Boomi .

MYOB Accounting Plus and Premier use an underlying data file to hold the records.

In the current versions this is not a relational databae, making traiditional integration difficult.

MYOB have over the years released a series of ODBC drivers. These have allowed programs such as Word and Excel to extract data and in some cases, insert data to MYOB. WDCi have taken this ODBC driver and created connectors for several integration platforms.

These connectors enable the integration of MYOB into nearly any platform or application, whether hosted or on-premise.

With this framework it is now cost effective to have an online eCommerce site integrated directly with MYOB to post order or invoice data and extract product data. Alternatively you can connect your CRM or ERP system into your MYOB accounting system.

The main objects that are typically integrated are:

- Company and individual contact information

- Product (Item) information

- Opportunity and Sales data to an Orders/Invoices within MYOB

- Shopping cart invoice and payment replication to MYOB

Anything in MYOB can be exposed and integrated to a vast array of applications, once you know how.  For more information contact us or check out our ReadyMade solutions for pre-built MYOB integration solutions.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you can productize specific business processes into a packaged integration solution.

This is something that regularly perplexes die-hard integration architects and at the opposite end of the spectrum regularly astounds SMEs when they find out there aren’t pre-built integrations between every application.

Who needs it?

SMEs now have access to tools and products at a fraction of the price they were years ago.  They can have best of breed solutions to run their business, BUT, who can afford to pay for a custom integration solution to integrate their data?  The applications are bleeding edge, but it doesn’t save you time and money if they aren’t in sync.

How to do it?

Our approach to this is ReadyMade, pre-built integration solutions that solve standard integration requirements between common applications.

Some history

We thought that there has to be some common business processes between applications.  So we spent some time looking at applications we know well, like salesforce.com.  We then looked at what accounting packages people use to connect to Salesforce and discovered that MYOB and Saasu were very popular in the Salesforce community in this part of the world.

So, we then took a look at how customers use MYOB on-premise and how they use Saasu in the cloud and used these observations to determine if there were common functions and processes that could be automated to save time and money.

And of course there are common processes that if integrated would provide the biggest bang for buck.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t easy to first work out the common integration processes, identify the right tool, develop the solution, price it right, market it, sell it and then back it up with support.

Well why do it?

Because we like to solve problems in the simplest way possible and we see the potential of SaaS but we also understand the role of existing applications to a company.  Let’s not fix something that isn’t broken.

The end result

Our ReadyMade solutions allow an SME to run the best of breed applications without the need to re-key data or deal with data inconsistencies and errors.

They don’t solve every integration process, they’re not meant to, that’s what custom integration solutions are for, they simply provide a productized integration for standard business processes between 2 defined applications and they do it at a low-cost.

Now that’s cool.  Talend announced today they’ve acquired all rights to the Master Data Management (MDM) technology of Amalto Technologies http://www.talend.com/press/Talend-Announces-First-Open-Source-Master-Data-Management-Solution.php.  This will enable organisations of any size to consolidate their data and tackle data management without spending a hefty sum.  This will present a viable alternative to the big guys, could be interesting.

Looking for asynchronous messaging on-demand, cloud-based and at a price that won’t break the bank, check out Linxter.  Linxter features include:

• Message Polling
• Transactional Queues
• Endpoint Reconfiguration
• Communication Channel Management
• Internet Connection Retries
• Non-repudiation
• File Chunking

At a price point starting as low as 5/mth - not bad.