Integration Solutions
Small businesses can have the leverage of the same level of automation that big companies enjoy, by integrating a solution out of industry standard off the shelf products. Main problem is to find someone who knows how to make the information flow between these applications to provide a smooth integrated solution that encompasses all aspects of the business. These kinds of solutions provide much greater value than that of the sum of all parts it is composed of.
Who needs it?
If you have a software that takes care of your business in a great way, but every day you sepend a lot of time to import/export data to/from this application to your accounting software, vendors and customers. Then you have a system that is screaming for integration.
Types of Integrations
Integration through Windows Service
Two types of Integrations are commonly used. The first kind is loosely connected and is typically implemented as a windows service that reads your database from time to time and update the third party software like Quick Books, MS Accounting Pro etc., Creates Excel Reports, CSV Files, EDI Files etc and saves in a directory for you to send to third parties that rely on these files. They can also send these files automatically through email or ftp.
Integration solutions that are provided through windows services are great in situations where you can not modify the existing software that you are using because you do not have the source code or you do not want to take any chance to break any working functionality in your existing software. This kind of solutions typically replace existing manual processes that depend on manual data entry or import/export data to or from third parties. These kind of integration can be done very quickly and helps abruptly cut off a lot of manual processing over night without touching your existing software.
Tight Integration through Software Modification
There is a different type of integration that involves modifying your existing application to add integration functionality. These are typically more tight integration, bi-directional and real time. There are few challenges in this method. You must have the source code of your application (Not the Third Party Applications). There can be challenges like the language and platform of your software may not be fully compatible with the third party application. If your application is written in Java, C#, VB.Net, Visual Basic or MS Access then you might be in luck in most of the cases. Because most third parties typically provide interface API that can be accessed with the most popular languages and platforms.
Typical candidate for tight integration are Software that want to add new features that require third party integration, software that have workflow that depend on real time response from third party applications and software that need realtime communication with the third party to operate (like inventory status, pricing changes etc.) effectively.
Cost Effective?
Off course! A very knowledgeable integrator can turn out a great solution within weeks if not days at a fraction of the cost of an enterprise solution. It saves you both time and money and gives you great confidence because you are using industry proven applications. Best of all, you do not have to do it all at once. Integrate one by one as your needs grow.
What are the challenges of Integration Solutions?
Integration solutions are very cost effective and provide great value but there are some pitfalls.
1. It is often
very difficult to find someone who can integrate with many products. It
requires a wide breadth of knowledge and understanding of the individual
products and the platforms they use.
2. Integration Solutions need a lot of testing to make sure that every thing is working perfectly in a harmonious way.
3. A new version of a third party application can break the current existing flow of the solution.4. Some times it can be challenging to choose the right software that can be easily integrated with the rest.
Conclusion:
There are excellent products out there which provide excellent capabilities for a particular need and provide great hooks to communicate with the product through API (Application Programming Interface) to do almost everything you can do by using the product interactively.
This is a great thing, because you can hire somebody to integrate your application with these third party software very easily. You can always take advantage of the best of the breed software by integrating.
Today, your integration guy can extract great values from free and paid internet based services and put them in front of your finger tips. For example, you can take advantage of Google maps, YouTube, flickr and face books by integrating them into your solution and extract great values from them.