WDCi Blogs

We recently had the opportunity to work with Mindjet and deliver their Netsuite-Salesforce integration using the Boomi Atomsphere platform.

It was a grueling task with a large data migration effort as well as several bidirectional integration processes due in a very short time frame (5 weeks).  Since completing the project we’ve gone on to implement a robust support and monitoring system to enable us and Mindjet to easily monitor and manage their integrations anytime, anywhere.

There’s some more detail in the Boomi blog, it was a big team effort with a dedicated customer that knew their business processes well and a platform that’s perfect for SaaS integration - thanks everyone, it’s time for pina coladas all round.

We have upgraded our Saasu Connector by implementing the newly released API by Saasu:

• Activities : CRUD
• ComboItem: CRUD

This implementation is important in one of our recent project. Feel free to check out the use case here.

Lets say that you have a database internally that holds some of your key data. You have just implemented a CRM in Salesforce and you want to be able to reference (lookup) this data in real time.

You have a couple of choices:
1) Copy all the data into Salesforce and keep the two systems synchronised. This is ok, and if you need the data frequently may be the best way to go

2) Keep the data in the database, and just look it up from there.

For option 2, this used to involve a fair bit of setup and a bit of custom coding to get it to all work nicely, and more importantly to work securely. A couple of recent features to two products has just made this easier.

Firstly, Salesforce.com has introduced a new feature to allow you to generate your own certificate to securely call a web Service inside your company firewall and be sure that the originator of the request was in fact your own Salesforce instance. See the following write-up for more info.. http://wiki.developerforce.com/index.php/Making_Authenticated_Web_Service_Callouts_Using_Two-Way_SSL

Secondly, Boomi has released a feature to expose a database query, or Stored procedure as a web Service that can be called in real time. This release from Boomi has opened up a whole range of possibilities to quickly and securely expose internal services to SaaS based applications.

For more information on this or other integration stories give us a call at WDCi..

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

We have built an LDAP Connector using the Boomi Atomsphere SDK.  The requirement was for Active Directory (AD) to Netsuite application integration for the synchronisation of Contact and authentication information between the client’s AD implementation and their Netsuite customer portal.  We chose to build an LDAP Connector for the solution. The Connector  can create, modify and activate users. It also can create Active Directory OU’s and groups and add the users to the groups. The connector supports SSL as well as non SSL communications

With the LDAP connector we can now integrate LDAP with other hosted or on-premise solutions such as SalesForce, RightNow, Sassu and many more.

For more information contact us.

Our objective is to simplify integration as much as possible, resulting in lower costs to implement and maintain. Lowering the cost and speeding up the time to market will enable companies of any size to utilise integration technology and eliminate manual intervention and data processing. Let’s face it you don’t have to be a big company to want to save time and money. Apart from using a mature tool such as Boomi Atomsphere, we work with you to define what’s important for a successful integration. Our process takes into account the following:

• What are we trying to achieve: the deadlines, the business drivers
• Connectivity requirements: the applications involved, the processes that need to be integrated
• Data formats: the best way to extract and synchronise your data, data examples
• Data volumes: what data volumes are involved and what is the frequency of updates
• What the integration process looks like: what does it need to do to connect, transform, synchronise and update your data
• How will the process run: when does the integration happen, ie hourly, daily, weekly etc, what happens if an error occurs
• Managing change: how are modifications and minor changes to the integration handled

We’ve put an outline of this process onto our website to help you kick-start your integration.  A bit of preparation will help you understand the process involved and will minimise the cost and frustrations in building out an integration solution.  If you like the idea, have a question or suggestion, email us @ rio@wdcigroup.net and let us know.

We had several clients ask us about MYOB integration. After doing some research we realised why, all the solutions we could find were custom code not true integration. If you are wondering why this isn’t suitable for everyone, you may find our comparison of custom code versus RIO helpful. These clients were interested in synchronising data with several SaaS applications such as Salesforce and @task and they wanted a true integration solution that allowed for flexibility moving forward and didn’t cost a bomb to maintain.

We have built a MYOB connector to address this issue and provide our customers with the ability to connect MYOB with just about any system. Our MYOB integration solution can be implemented in days and is maintained for you, so less hassles if you need to extract or synchronise different data or connect to different systems moving forward.

If you are interested in a trial of our MYOB connector, email rio@wdcigroup.net and we’ll set it up for you.

I’ve read a lot of blogs/articles about integration being a significant barrier to SaaS adoption in the enterprise. Sure integration can be a challenge, but in my opinion it’s not as scary as some of the articles imply.

Using a tool like Boomi, implemented as part of a solution like RIO makes use of the excellent APIs that many of the SaaS vendors have put in place. Boomi offers a true integration solution, has more than 40+ connectors/adapters and enables you to integrate to just about anything. Admittedly some of the SaaS vendors (and many of the on-premise vendors) present some challenges to integration, but there’s always a way to extract and insert your data.

I’m not downplaying the fact that integration can be a challenge, I’m just suggesting that it’s possible and there are tools out there to do it and to do it fast.  Before we partnered with Boomi we looked at 20+ tools for SaaS integration and whilst Boomi was ahead of the pack, many of the tools were decent and have come a long way in the past 12 months.

I’ve posted some reasons why we think that RIO is hot, you may want to check it out.  From our perspective, integration from SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premise applications is achievable within days, with a solution that allows for ongoing monitoring and maintenance at a low-cost.