What is 'integration'?
Integration is the process of enabling two or more systems to interact with each other, typically to prevent the need to rekey information and to keep a single 'source of truth'. For example you may have an existing CRM and you need a new application to show a list of your customers; rather than duplicating the customer information you will integrate with the existing customer database to retrieve and maybe update customer details.
The methods of integration we've used are discussed briefly below and are often determined by the provider of the software we are integrating with. Part of this process would involve feasibility studies/work to ensure that the integrations can be made and maintained. Understanding the underlining data and structures is also key to this approach for streamlining business processes and improving efficiency within it.
What approaches do we take to integrate with your systems?
Direct-to-Database
As the name suggests this is used to query information directly from a third party's database and is the most efficient way to integrate. However whilst you may get agreement from the third party to read information you are less likely to get permission to write directly back to the database; great care needs to be applied when doing so in to prevent bypassing critical programmatic data validations.
API's
An API (Application Programming Interface) are software methods to be used by third-party developers to retrieve and maybe update data held within their systems. They are the most common method of integration since the information flow can be controlled by the third party who can enforce any necessary data validations. Breeze developers have a wealth of experience using API's provided by numerous third-parties to integrate with their systems.
File Import/Export
Many third party systems, especially larger ERP systems have the ability to export various pieces of data in fixed formats to be used for reporting or for importing into another system. We have developed a number of applications that take daily feeds of data from another source before presenting them with that data in system(s) we create for them.
Screen/Email Scraping
This would generally be used as a last resort if there is no API available and no access to a database, but can be a useful tool whereby the information you require is displayed in a set format on a screen or more commonly in an email. It is not ideal for a number of reasons as the format may change without notice and the data could have unforeseen formatting issues which would need to be detected and handled in the scraping code.