WDCi Blogs

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

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.

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.