Scribe Software Blog

Scribe’s First 2012 Partner Summit in NYC

2012-04-19T16:11:42-04:00

Today we're presenting our first Partner Summit for 2012 in Time Square in NYC.

After the great feedback we received from our user conference sessions, we decided to take Scribe on-the-road to our partners for a day full of 10 educational sessions. With partners spanning from Toronto to CA, we're glad we have another one coming up next month in Chicago for those were weren't able to make it today.

Who will get the most out of the partner summits? The consultants working hands–on with customer integrations, sales team members who could learn more about how to best sell and position Scribe, as well as new sales team members since we give you the opportunity to do a live in-class sales certification training right there!

The summit is still in action now… so I wanted to share a few pictures "live" with you as well as the agenda we're covering. If you're a Scribe partner, you still have a chance to register for next month's partner Summit in Chicago here. May 17 in downtown Chicago, 9-5:30pm.

Agenda for NY and Chicago Partner Summits

Keynote – State of Data Integration 2012 - Analyzing data integration trends and the impact on your business
Scribe Online - Scribe Online platform overview, demonstration, latest features and benefits
SharePoint/Webservices (Technical) - Leveraging Scribe Insight for SharePoint and Webservices integrations
Sales Certification/Partner Portal (Business) - Understanding Scribe product positioning, architecture, and pricing. Introduction to new Scribe Partner Portal
Top Ten Insight Issue/Resolutions (Technical) - Review of the most commonly reported Scribe Insight issues and their resolutions
Selling in the Enterprise (Business) - Scribe is the perfect fit for your enterprise opportunities – learn why in this session
Improving Insight Performance (Technical) - Tips and tricks for getting the best performance out of your Insight deployment
Mainstreaming the Cloud (Business) - Cloud apps? Premise apps? Both? Turning integration challenges into opportunity
New and Overlooked Insight Features - Introduction to new and making the most of some old (but gold) Insight features
Future directions and closing - Here's where we're headed, join us for what will be a great ride!

REGISTER TODAY! Registrations are already in the double digits for Chicago and seating is limited with only 25 seats left. Register now for the Chicago partner Summit, Thursday May 17. Continental breakfast and registration 8-9am, sessions 9-5:30pm (lunch included), and cocktail reception on-site 5:30-7pm. Cost is $99 per person.

BONUS: We're also offering a follow-up half-day Integration Day on Friday May 18, from 8:30-noon. 3 1/2 hours of integration information that is perfect for prospects, or customers who aren't finding they are using Scribe as extensively as they could. We have invitations already created that are appropriate for partners to send out to your contacts, so contact me if you're interested. Otherwise be sure to sign up for Integration Day yourself and get an opportunity to have a 15 min private session with our pre-sales technical team member (only available on Integration Day).

Wondering if we'll hold more Partner Summits this year farther west? Right now they aren't planned, therefore we recommend you plan a trip to Chicago so you don't miss out on this great education opportunity! Additional questions? Contact partners@scribesoft.com or contact me directly at heather.robinson@scribesoft.com.

Integration for Everyone

2012-03-15T21:04:04-04:00

I was going to write a blog about getting more value from your existing business data with integration. We're going to take a little detour and talk about Scribe's State of Customer Data Integration Study 2012. There's a lot of great information in the study that I think customers and partners will find useful.

The focus of the study was to understand what you were thinking about when considering customer data, CRM, and how that's integrated with the rest of your business operations. There was one statistic that was a bit of an eye popper for me.

Only 15% of you have fully integrated CRM or customer facing systems. 15%. That's pretty low.

On the one hand, that's a great opportunity for integration vendors like Scribe. On the other hand, that tells me that we have a lot of work to do to make integration accessible to businesses large and small. One of the things that also stood out in the study was that business got the value of data integration but it was a bit harder to figure out how to make it happen. As I read the results of the study, I was asking myself what is it about integration that businesses are having a hard time figuring out where to start and how to implement?

There are a few factors that likely play into this: media hype, cost, complexity of integration itself, and many, many integration options, techniques, and products. It seems that most of us tackle integration like you'd approach your first marathon. You decide you want to really run a marathon. You want to lose weight, get into shape, knock something off the bucket list, and proudly slap a 26.2 sticker on your car.

Some of us start looking at training programs and decide it's too much commitment and change so we just drop the whole marathon thing and go on to something else. Others start out enthusiastic with our training program, but it's hard, we're not used to it and we're sore, and so we drop out after week 3 or 4. Or we follow our training program but we're setting goals that our body can't handle – like running a faster pace each training run to get down to a 7 minute mile – and we're forced to quit due to overtraining or injury.

Integration is the same as deciding to run your first marathon. Some of us start with "we have to integrate everything!" and realize the complexity, commitment and price is too high to do that, so we do no integration. Others run too fast and too hard – we're going to integrate our financial operations with CRM in 10 days! – and the result is a failed or half working integrations. We start integration projects, run into roadblocks – maybe an integration approach that wasn't quite the right fit, the tool we choose was a bit more complex or harder to learn, or perhaps a poor experience with the implementer. So we walk away and say integration is too hard, too complex, too expensive, and we just can't do it.

That's a shame. Integration is something that every business can benefit from – the trick is not running the marathon but starting with a 5K, getting some success, doing a few more 5Ks, maybe harder ones this time, and then building up from there to 10K, half-marathon, and finally, your marathon debut is fairly easy and you're ready for it. Slow is fast. Your integration strategy should start small and build on your successes and experience. If you need to do a big bang approach and you really are committed, then you need to get an integration expert to help you.

Almost all businesses can get the benefits of integration and there are a range of options to fit most budgets and problems. So let's talk about how to strategies to successfully implement integration in your business.

Be Real

Depending on what you read out in the media, integration is often presented as an enterprise vision of all your systems and data talking together. We use important business phrases like "operational efficiencies", "customer centric and social enterprise", "line of business effectiveness", "the challenge of engagement" – sounds very strategic and grand doesn't it? Vendors come in and talk about master data management, big data, data governance, orchestration, ETL, and hybrid – all the things important, enterprise businesses should be thinking about and you're an enterprise right?

I'm sure there are some eye rolls at this point and yes, Scribe is guilty of the above – hey, we're in the business of integration and we market just like everyone else – but honestly, how many business initiatives have you seen in your career become disasters because the scope is too sweeping and grand?

Even when we get down a level and talk about solutions to business problems, we still talk "large" like front office to back office, social, and supply chain. When I say I want to integrate my CRM system with my ERP system what does that mean exactly? What actual benefit will I see from all that? Where and what do I start? What is going to give me the biggest bang for my buck?

This is project management and planning 101 but it bears repeating - step back and really look at the business problem you're trying to solve. Be tactical and find things that will have actual results that you can see, feel, and touch that will have most impact to your business. Often times it's the little things that have big impact to your sales or support teams. For instance, you want your sales or lead qualification people to jump on leads from that last trade show before your competitors do. You can't afford to wait a week to have your marketing coordinator data enter the leads into your CRM application manually.

Being real isn't the most sexy approach but you'll have a much better shot at being successful and showing real business benefit for your integration project. More often than not, these are fairly straightforward and easy integration items to implement. Building on these successes gives you the ability to get funding and support for your more complex and sophisticated integration plans.

Live Within Your Means

Understanding the cost – money, resources, and time – is important. Setting a budget and sticking to it is equally important. Combined with a realistic integration goal, your budget will drive your approach and absolutely help you narrow down your choices to a reasonable level. It's easy to get sucked into "well, this has MDM capability for only $500 a month more". If you don't know what MDM means or how you would apply it to your business tactically, resist the urge to buy for "someday" or "for only $$$ we can do XYZ too". You want to be successful and you want the business to want more integration. Stick to your plan, your budget, and your guns.

You don't have to have large startup costs or buy an enterprise platform to get the benefits of integration for your business. There are a range of integration options out there, some starting as low as $99 a month (such as Scribe Online) that can solve the business problem I described above. You can find an approach that fits your budget and your goals, no matter how small or large.

The Right Tool for the Job

None of us would build a house with a screwdriver and we don't drive nails with a sledgehammer. The same is true for integration. Buy the right tool for the right job. If you want to integrate Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics GP and that is your most major business problem and goal, look at vendors that have products that actually have application specific connectors and templates that get you there with a minimum of fuss and custom work.

Going with a generic integration platform that does everything and anything but nothing specifically has its own challenges. It's tempting to go this way because we're feeling we're getting most value for our money; we won't have to buy another integration platform or look at another approach ever again. However, you need to think about "living within your means" because the most generic of integration platforms also means that you're likely doing some extra work to get your integration project completed. For instance, if an integration approach can connect to your CRM application via SOAP Web Services, that's great but if it means that you have to write Web Services calls to map and integrate your data, or perhaps even have to write custom code against an SDK, you can quickly get mired into more cost, more time, more risk, and more money. If you don't have the time, expertise, or appetite for this extra work, your money is better spent on a more targeted integration solution that can address your needs.

But Plan for the Future

This is a tricky one – you don't want to blow your budget or get overwhelmed with an integration platform – but you also don't want to pick an integration approach or platform that is so limited or black box that 6 – 12 months later you have to buy something else to accomplish your integration goals because something changed or you needed more. Make sure that your integration platform has enough flexibility to change as you change and that it has a suitable range of connectivity options that you can add other applications or endpoints later on. For instance, you want to integrate Salesforce to Dynamics GP integration and you're also thinking of adding in your SQL based, legacy support application in the next 12 months. Your integration platform should have native SQL connectivity so you can easily map your legacy support application to Salesforce.

That said, you also want to watch out for getting swept up in the hype of current trends and go with an integration platform that is too big, broad, or complex for your business and your abilities to handle. It's easy to be impressed by things like MDM, Big Data, Social, and a laundry list of connectors and solutions. If you can't see when or why your business will use or integrate with Big Data, don't buy a platform because it can handle Big Data. If all you need is to be able to de-dupe records and standardize address formats, don't buy an integration platform that has sophisticated MDM capabilities. If you see a laundry list of connectors or solutions, make sure that the solutions and connectors you want to use are current and will be maintained. You don't want to buy an integration platform that has an advertised connector for Oracle Siebel only to find out the vendor has not updated the connector in the last 2 years and has no plans to keep it current.

When evaluating integration vendors or approaches, makes sure that the solutions, connectivity options, and the vision or roadmap match your business goals and strategy for the foreseeable future.

It's OK to Need Help

You have a business and you do your thing very well. Frankly, for most of us, integration is not "your thing" that you do well. Some businesses have made a commitment to have a full time integration resource because integration is as important as their ERP or CRM systems. Many of us are between just starting to various stages along the integration journey. Some of us need help planning the project, picking the integration approach or platform, and implementing it. We may not know all the ins and outs of the cloud or legacy applications that we're trying to integrate. A good partner will know your industry, your applications, and have experience integrating them. You'll gain the benefit and expertise of someone who has done integration many, many times and has encountered all kinds of projects and scenarios. Your partner can advise you on best practices or what has worked for their other clients.

The price tag can seem hefty up front but in most cases, it's far less than what you'd spend in time, money, and resources if you were to tackle integration on your own. We found that customers who use outside help have a higher level of success and satisfaction with their integrations. There are a myriad of options – from hourly consulting to multi-month formal engagements – so if you need help, get it. It is truly money well spent.

Yes, You Can!

Integration does not have to be overwhelming. You've got a lot of options out there and partners who are willing and happy to help. Focus on the business problem you have and look at the information you have today in your applications – how can you better put that together or move it around to the right places? Start small with an integration project that is relatively simple to complete and fulfills a specific goal. You'll see tangible benefits from your project, the business will thank you, and you can continue to build up the sophistication and complexity of your integrations over time.

Let us know how it goes, we're interested in hearing your thoughts on integration. Share your stories with us.

If you're interesting in viewing our report, The State of CRM Data Integration 2012, please click here.

Blog author: Betsy Bilhorn

Scribe Online Tips and Tricks: Using Escape Characters with Scribe Online Synchronization Service

2012-03-05T13:48:52-05:00

The Scribe technical team has been working to compile a useful list of technical tips and tricks to help users get the most out of the system. We'll be offering these to you as blog posts and tutorial videos posted online. For this one, we'll be talking about formatting data and using escape characters within formulas.

During the mapping of data between different endpoints, there may be some formatting transformation that needs to occur; the example we're going to use here is writing address data to Salesforce.com. Salesforce addresses are basically 3 rows of data separated by carriage return/line feeds, all stored within 1 text field. In order to mimic this formatting we must concatenate several fields together along with escape characters to allow the carriage return/line feed to be added between our 3 concatenated fields.

We are able to accomplish this with SYS as these escape characters are able to be used within a formula, but, there is a caveat. You must first declare that you are going to be using these characters in the next segment of text. This is done by using the $ character prior to the text string with the escape characters. To explain what this means, we'll use a real example. We have three Address fields in our source data, Line1, Line2, and Line 3. They contain the following data

If we were to simply concatenate these fields together as seen in the formula below

our resulting value would look like this:

Obviously we can do better than this. Instead of simply concatenating them together, we'll use our escape characters. The formula seen below is designed to use these escape characters and will allow our data to be written to Salesforce.com with the proper formatting.

Here you can see the result of our formula, where our data is represented with the proper syntax and formatting.

By concatenating our escape characters \r and \n we were able to put a carriage return/line feeds between each field, resulting in the formatting we needed to bring that address properly into Salesforce. To illustrate the importance of declaring these special characters, I have removed the $ from the formula we used before

The resulting data in Saleforce.com would appear as it is seen here

So you can see that without our $ declaration, it's interpreted as plain text. There are many escape characters that can be used to assist you within formulas, we have outlined some in our online help, and you can also simply look these up online to get some definition around what is and is not possible.

Hopefully this will help you as you begin to use the Scribe Online Synchronization Service. Keep an eye out for more tips and tricks coming from our technical team here at Scribe Let us know if you have any comments about things you would like to see explained.

Make New Friends, But Keep the Old, Cloud is Silver and Hybrid Gold

2012-02-17T11:47:27-05:00

My last blog post we talked about the top trends in integration which covered quite a bit of ground. Today we're going to take a closer look at hybrid and the "hybrid problem". Hopefully when we're done you're not equating hybrid with certain unprintable words. Hybrid can be indeed gold.

What is hybrid anyway?

Depending on whom you're talking to and what you're reading, the term hybrid can get confusing. We see people use the term "hybrid" to cover infrastructure or application environments, pieces of an application that are available on premise or online, or, lately, I've heard someone refer to a channel partner as "hybrid" because they were implementing both online and premise based solutions. A recent article on CIO.com refers to "hyper-hybrid". Hybrid seems to be one of those popular adjectives like "social" or "cloud" that are used pretty much everywhere and with everything. And of course, as integration vendors, we've got hybrid integration.

The most common cases where you see the label "hybrid" is in the case of infrastructure and applications. When we talk about hybrid infrastructure, we're talking about portions of your server, storage, and other data center components living both behind the firewall in your data center and parts in a public or private cloud. The situation is the same for applications; a business that has applications in the cloud and on premise has a hybrid business application environment. When Scribe or other integration vendors talk about hybrid integration, we're talking about integrating cloud and premise based applications.

The term hybrid seems to get a bad rap – it's a complex problem, so many pitfalls, it creates new silos, it's a problem. Proponents of the cloud would like you to go all cloud - the cloud just magically makes everything and everyone work better. If you peel away the marketing and media hype around cloud or hybrid, a hybrid application environment is necessary and a fact of life for most of us. And there are actually good things about hybrid environments – not all of us have budget or cast iron stomach to rip and replace all our business applications to pure cloud. Practically speaking, most of us follow "if ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to replacing applications.

Don't get me wrong, I love cloud applications. I love the technologies and user experience that cloud, social, and mobile bring to market. Those technologies have helped Scribe do things with our Scribe Online platform that we could never do with our premise solution. Cloud, social, and mobile has also got us thinking and planning about how do we incorporate some of those elements into our premise based solution? Speaking as the VP of Product Management, I could geek out on Cloud, Social, and Mobile all day long and never get tired of it.

Speaking as an executive of Scribe who, with the rest of our leadership team, has to manage the business and operations of Scribe, going all cloud loses its luster pretty quickly. Like most of you, we've been in business for a while and we have premise applications that are absolutely critical to our operations. Being an integration vendor, those premise applications are highly integrated with our business and with each other –it's not a simple thing to rip them out for the sake of being all in the cloud. Mike Ehrenberg, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and CTO for Microsoft Business Solutions, says it best in the recentCIO.com article, Forget about Public Cloud or Private Cloud, It's All About Hyper-Hybrid: "Our perspective is that it's irrational to think someone will go to work on Friday and all their work will be on-prem, and then they come into work Monday and everything will be in the cloud. People are going to live with assets in both places for a long time."

Scribe has implemented a number of cloud based applications in our own business operations over the years. I'll share some of our experiences and thought processes which maybe are experiences you've had or are about to have when looking at cloud applications. The reality for Scribe is that hybrid is the least risky and the best approach when adopting cloud. Integration can help further reduce that risk and best leverage both premise and cloud applications. Your hybrid environment just becomes your business application environment when you have a strong integration methodology and platform.

Let's talk about two common scenarios where hybrid (and integration) can be gold for your business. The first would be the case of the ancient premise system that just works but isn't very sexy and doesn't have all the capabilities you need today. The second is the case where you've outgrown the capabilities of a particular business system and you need to replace it.

Making the Best of What You Have

You know that system that everyone snickers and rolls their eyes about because it's probably from the 80's? You discuss every year that THIS YEAR you are going to replace it, you daydream about all the better things you can do if you had something else? Yep, we have one of those. That software is so many revs back it's embarrassing to say but it just chugs along, never has an outage, never acts flaky, and does what it's supposed to do very well and simply. We've talked about and looked at replacement systems or adding modules to our CRM system many times and we decided to not to do anything because the incremental benefit was pretty low compared to the risk, distraction and cost to implement a completely new system. The biggest beef we had internally was "I really need to see that information in our CRM system" and "I don't want to log into two systems". We have a cloud based CRM system – so instead of buying a new support system and launching a rather large migration/implementation project, we spent the time integrating our old support system into our cloud based CRM system. Problem solved. (For now).

The biggest issue was access to the data so we tackled that one via integration. That caused zero disruption to our support operations and now all our sales people can access support cases in CRM. The cost to Scribe? Other than some internal resource time to map and implement the integration, zero. It also bought us time to plan, budget, and evaluate new vendors on the merit of the capabilities and features we want in a support system. We can also use integration to two-tier the old system and our new support system into CRM so that we can have a less risky and smoother cutover. Our support reps can close tickets in the old system and work new cases in the new system. The Sales team has all of the support information – old and new – at their fingertips. We can then plan the migration of old support cases to the new system and do that on a longer, more controlled time horizon rather than a big bang migration approach.

Another way to extend the life of those older applications is to look for cloud applications that provide the feature or function that you really need and then integrate the two. Using the support system example above, let's say we can't publish knowledge base articles to the web very easily and we'd really like a full featured, robust knowledge base portal on our website. Our existing software can't do that. We don't have the people or the money or time to write something ourselves – and why do that when we can purchase a cloud based knowledge base solution? Through integration, we could populate knowledge base articles from our support system. So instead of ripping out and replacing a perfectly good – but old – business application, we can add functionality via cloud based apps and integration.

Picking the Best for your Business

Our second scenario is the case of the financial system that simply didn't fit our growing business. We had to replace the system with a new one – there were no alternatives. In this case, we did a thorough evaluation of both cloud and premise ERP vendors. What was interesting to note about the selection process was that at no time was the delivery platform – cloud, hosted, or premise – a part of the discussion or impacted the decision. Why? Because we knew whatever we picked we could integrate with our existing business applications. Having integration at the ready freed us to focus absolutely on the best vendor for our business needs. We ended up selecting an on premise ERP system and it is fully integrated into both our cloud and premise applications.

In this case, if you have a robust integration approach, you don't have to limit your options. All of these ERP vendors we looked at had APIs or direct access to the database that our integration products could talk to easily. In my past life at other companies, the choice of cloud versus premise was a very big deal precisely because we did not have a strong integration platform or integration strategy – how the API worked, what language it was in, was it LAMP or MSFT stack, and how difficult or easy we could write to that API was absolutely part of the initial vetting processes. Had we had an integration strategy other than custom code and getting to it later as a Phase II project, it's very likely we would have picked different vendors.

Why Partners and ISVs should care about Hybrid

Your customers have premise systems and they aren't going to get rid of them. While customers may be at different levels of their sophistication and use of integration, most of them know the importance of having applications share data and processes. What we're seeing and hearing is that integration is coming up much earlier in the sales cycle and in more cases, a key decision point. For instance, I might be replacing my CRM system but I'm extremely happy with my marketing automation vendor. It's very important that my new CRM system integrate with my existing marketing automation solution. If it doesn't, I'm going to be looking at CRM systems that do integrate with my marketing automation solution or I'm going to find a new partner who can make that integration happen. As a reseller or an ISV, you don't want to lose a deal because you can't integrate your application or you can't answer the question.

Likewise, you do not want the IT department of your customer to torpedo your sales cycle because they are concerned about an integration project with custom code and/or they don't have a strong integration approach already. Everyone is excited about the business value and now you've got roadblocks like "your API is in .NET, we're a Java shop" or "Cloud is bad because I can't get to the data" or "we don't have the time, money or resources to write code to this thing – it's easier on premise". You don't want roadblocks like this when you're trying to close a sale.

Have a good integration approach at the ready and answer "yes" to those questions, erase objections, and overcome fears. Anticipating and solving the customer's worries raises your profile – you've got an excellent offering and you've solved the "hybrid problem".

It's All Good

Premise, hosted, or cloud systems aren't better than one or the other, they're different. We all have different reasons for choosing these delivery platforms and sticking with our premise applications. If you have a good integration approach that can handle premise and cloud applications together, you can leverage the benefits of both delivery methods and get the absolute best for your business.

Next post we'll explore an old but good friend – the data you already have in your business. We'll talk about how to leverage the data you already have and of course, how integration can help you maximize that data in CRM to better sell and service your customers.

Blog author: Betsy Bilhorn

Waterfalls, 2012 Trends, and Integration

2012-01-31T14:16:15-05:00

As we end January, most of us have read various industry articles and blogs predicting the top trends for 2012. Data integration has had its fair share of trends and predictions; Jeff Kaplan and Loraine Lawson both have some of the more interesting blog posts on what they see coming up in 2012. Jeff and Lori both talk about integration and data trends that make perfect sense as the CRM and tech industry in general goes through its own evolutions. You might be already experiencing these trends (or about to experience them) – hybrid, mobile, and of course, the cloud. Other trends may or may not be on your horizon line like social, big data, data marts, and private/public cloud but definitely we’ve seen and heard a lot about them.

Both Jeff and Lori touch on larger trends that are applicable to just about everyone: hybrid, social, mobile, consumerization of IT, and data ownership. Big data, private cloud, and cloud analytics might be a long tail for some. We’ve all read and heard about these throughout 2011 and will continue to do so in 2012. But how does this apply to my business? What does it even mean for integration and why am I reading about this in Scribe’s blog – I’m just trying to integrate my CRM system! It’s like looking at the lip of a 100 foot waterfall - how in the world am I going to even attempt this social, mobile, big data, hybrid, consumerized IT monster and still own my cloud data when I get to the bottom? Will I even make it in one piece? Why should I even try?

Trends are like waterfalls – popular, powerful, and majestic looking. You feel good when looking at them. You want to feel the power. Some crazy people, like me, like going over them in a kayak. But if you blindly jump or fall into one, or as kayakers say “blow your line”, it’s not going to be good times for you. Some folks walk away and others jump in without proper preparation and get into trouble. Trends are the same way – pick the right one and the right size, scout and plan what you are going to do, get some trusted partners to set safety and support you, and you’ll “style your line”. Running a waterfall can be a huge rush when done properly and implementing a trend – in a practical way - can bring the same rush to your business. The trick is picking the right one and applying it to the right circumstance so you’re styling your line and not getting hurt.

At Scribe, we’ve picked our line through these trends – CRM – and in the coming weeks we’ll be talking to you how to style CRM using integration in your business and overcome obstacles like hybrid, private/public cloud, social, analytics, data ownership, and data governance. Done right, you’ll avoid carnage and enjoy the rush.

If you’re not ready to take on a waterfall just yet, we’ll also be talking about how to get some excitement from those rivers and streams in your own backyard - your premise apps – with your CRM system to get maximum value out of all your data and better sell and service your customers. I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t enjoy increasing sales and having happy customers – we’ll give you tips and tricks to navigate those waters successfully!

In the month of February, we’ll be tackling 3 big ones for CRM that everyone seems to be talking about – social, hybrid, and data management - and an old friend you shouldn’t be taking for granted, the customer data you already have in your business today. We’ll also be showcasing some partners and customers who use integration successfully with their CRM systems and the real life, tangible benefits that integration can bring to your business.

Here’s to a happy and successful 2012 – we’re looking forward to helping you enjoy the ride!

The Five Capabilities of a Collaborative Integration Platform – 5. Expandability

2012-01-02T20:56:50-05:00

In my last installment I spoke of the need for Supportability in your integration solution once you have put it into production. In this final post, I will discuss the need to expand your integration solution with the demands of your business.

To coin the old adage, there is only one thing in business that is constant and that is change. What happens if you identify some other touch points that need to be integrated? What is the impact of adding a new business application that is integral to your business processes into the mix? What happens if you make significant changes to the way your people interact with customers? How do you deal with the replacement of one of the applications involved? What if you acquire another company with different business systems and processes? These things occur frequently and should account in your integration strategy.

A common mistake with data integration is trying to do too much the first time. Seeking to integrate any and all touch points that you can envision up front can weigh a project down and significantly increase risk. A smart approach is to prioritize the different integration processes, particularly those things that will drive CRM user adoption in the initial phase, and then tackle a manageable number at the first phase. Additional integration processes can then be added over time.

This need for expandability requires that we think strategically and implement tactically when it comes to integration. It is important that the tools and approaches you utilize are nimble enough to meet your short-term needs without busting the budget while forming a strong foundation where future expansion can be easily accommodated.

Thanks for reading these posts and remember these five essential elements for successful data integration; reusability, flexibility, transferability, supportability, and expandability. And as I mentioned when introducing this topic, these elements should shed some light on the capabilities of our new integration platform, Scribe Online, as well as some of the continued investments we will be making in Scribe Insight.

Happy New Year 2012!

2011-12-22T09:08:55-05:00

As we close out 2011, we want to thank our partners and our customers for doing business with Scribe. We've had a big year with the launch of new products, Replication and Synchronization Services, on our Scribe Online cloud integration platform. We're equally excited about our upcoming release of Insight 7.5 this week. This version will allow our partners and customers to integrate wherever they are world-wide, and we're looking forward to working with new partners and customers in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.

However, expanding around the globe is a bit more than software enhancements! We're making investments throughout Scribe to support your integration needs such as:

The EMEA office will be expanding to a team of 5 and adding a dedicated pre-sales engineer. This includes relocating Linda Johnson, who many of you have worked with for the past five years. So, you will be hearing from Linda as well as seeing her more!
Starting in January, Enterprise customers and Elite partners will have access to 24x7 Support for critical support issues.
With the addition of Roger Hodskins, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, and more of my focus, we continue to deepen relationships with the global system integrators with whom we partner, such as Ciber, Columbus IT, Hitachi Consulting and Logica.
You'll be hearing more about how multi-national Scribe customers and partners solve interesting challenges and reap the benefits of providing superior service to their customers, decrease costs, and increase operational efficiencies.

We wish you a wonderful holiday season and a sincere "Thank You!" for your support and business throughout 2011. Stay tuned for more in 2012!

Multi-Target Use Cases: an alternative approach for product catalog integration between Dynamics NAV and Dynamics CRM

2011-11-03T11:38:46-04:00

In this post I want to share an idea with you I came about during my experimentation with the multi-target feature of Scribe Insight 7. My company, Succentric, specializes in the support and enablement of both new and existing Scribe partners, particularly regarding Dynamics NAV and Dynamics CRM. As such we get a lot of feedback around the topic of the Adapter for NAV. When the NAV/CRM template was released back in 2009, one of the first remarks we got was this: This is a great solution, but what about customers with large item master data?

Those of you that are familiar with the NAV/CRM template will know that in order to match the different data models of Dynamics NAV and Dynamics CRM a custom table was built in NAV that would store all combinations of items, variants, and sales prices available the NAV Company, calculated by Scribe Integration processes called ScribeSalesPrices. Let's imagine a company with just 125,000 products with on average 5 variants and also on average 3 different prices per variant. That'll give you 1.875 million records in this table. It is not prevalent scenario, but it is quite obvious that if the situation is like this, we could get into trouble with this approach. At the time the template was originally built, there was scarcely an alternative. But the multi-target-feature introduced in Scribe Insight 7 allows a completely new approach, which also may fit to other scenarios where the differences in the data model require a high degree of calculation and/or expansion of the data during the integration.

The following text is not a step-by-step guide, but rather an outline to discuss the possibilities and it will require considerable NAV skills to implement. However, it may be inspiring to some of you, and it shows the direction to a solution for a whole class of complex problem.

If we have a static list structure on the CRM side, and a dynamic, engine-driven structure on the ERP side, we have to execute the ERP logic in order to build all the data as a static snapshot. But can't we avoid storing the result in an extra table just for the sake of integrating it? What we would need to do is execute the price calculation for every n-tuple from inside a DTS, and immediately write the result to the CRM price list item entity. In our example this can be achieved in the following way.

First, we have to design a new DTS that would use the "Sales Price"-Table of Dynamics NAV as a source. This table contains a record with a sales price for each combination of

Item
Item Variant
Price Group or Customer Code
Date
Currency
Unit
Minimum Quantity

It is also used by the current NAV/CRM template, but the result of the integration process that is processing those records is just written back to NAV. But actually the Sales Price table provides all we need to create a sales order, which is the most convenient way to execute NAV's pricing engine. We can retrieve the price as it was calculated by Dynamics NAV immediately after the execution of our step by storing the "Unit Price" field of the Sales Line table in a target variable. As a result, we'd get a particular price that would be valid as a specific CRM price list item, and with the multi-target feature, we can within the same DTS both create a sales order and price lists and price list items on the target side. And we can get completely rid of the ScribeSalesPrice table that can become so large.

Now you may say, "That's great, but wait a sec. What about all those useless sales orders we create all around the place? We will have to delete them afterwards, which is costly in terms of NAV system resources, and it will leave huge gaps in our sales doc. No. series." That is why we would only create those sales orders temporarily that means without actually storing the Header and Line records to the database and without creating a document no. Doing this is actually a Dynamics NAV standard procedure that is used in lot of circumstances if specific prices are needed.

To do this with Scribe, we have two options. The first one is less work, but it will require a change in the NAV adapter C/AL code, in the adapter's NAV objects. We would enhance the adapter to allow us to choose if a step would create permanent or temporary records. To do this we have to perform the following actions:

Add a field to the Sales Header table that acts as a semaphore we can use to indicate what we want to do. It can be any data type really, but an option field will probably be the best fit.
Change the code in the function "InsertRecord" of Codeunit "Scribe Adapter commands":

IF ( = 'yes') THEN BEGIN
RecRef.OPEN(tmpInt,TRUE);
xRecRef.OPEN(tmpInt,TRUE);
END ELSE BEGIN
RecRef.OPEN(tmpInt);
xRecRef.OPEN(tmpInt);
END;
Make sure that we apply a dummy value to the No. / Document No. fields of the Sales Header / Sales Line table in the data mapping of our Insert steps.

The beauty of this option is that it is less effort to implement, but the downside is that you have to modify actual adapter code. Only those that have high level of NAV coding experience should do that. You should make this decision very explicitly by weighing the gain and the risks.

The second option gives you more security and you omit the risk of screwing up your adapter, but it'll mean more effort. However, I would strongly recommend this option to most users. The idea is simply to code a custom action that calls a custom Codeunit that creates the temporary Sales Order, and returns the calculated line values as they are needed. To do this we have to perform the following actions:

Following the Steps in the Help file for the Adapter for Dynamics NAV (Section "Working with actions"), create a new Codeunit. Prepare a "GetInputParameters"-Function as described in the help file, and make sure that all of the above listed parameters are distributed to global variables.
Create your "ExecuteCustomAction"-Function and put your code for creating your Sales Header and Line there. Make sure that you are using temporary variables for Sales Header and Sales Line, and that you predefine a Sales Doc. by filling a value in the field "No." of the Sales Header (can be '0' for example). Also, you need to create your Sales Line in the following way:
SalesLine.SetSalesHeader(VerkKopf);
SalesLine.INIT;
SalesLine."Line No." := SalesHeader."Line No." + 10000;
SalesLine."Document Type" := SalesHeader."Document Type";
SalesLine ."Document No." := SalesHeader."No.";

SalesLine.INSERT;
Prepare your "SetOutputParameters"-Function as described in the Adapter help, and put all relevant values from the Sales Line table record there.
In your DTS with the Sales Price Table as Source, add an Execute Step to call your custom action.

I hope this information about these two approaches will help you determine the best strategy for your NAV integrations that use Scribe Insight. As part of my participation the October edition of the Scribe Inside Track web meeting, I led a discussion about these approaches of using the Adapter for NAV.

Partnering for Cloud Success

2011-10-24T10:27:15-04:00

The advent of Cloud computing and the availability of cloud based business applications is dramatically changing the IT environment for companies of all sizes. The Cloud offers simplification…simplification of the user experience and simplification for those responsible for managing the application deployments. It enables companies to get to value faster with their IT investments, allowing them to focus less on technology issues and place more attention on redefining and streamlining their business processes.

At the same time, the rapid adoption of the cloud, including the accelerating use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, has resulted in an explosion of new data coming at companies from all directions, including from employees, customers, vendors, partners, and other market influencers. Companies that can integrate, assimilate, and make sense of that information across the enterprise will be the winners. Being in the data integration business, this is really good news for our organization. To take advantage of this opportunity, however, will require us to work closely with the hundreds of implementation partners we rely on to deliver our products in order to meet the changing economic model of the Cloud.

A number of our partners are responding quickly to this changing landscape. They are transforming large portions of their practices from being technology integrators to becoming higher level solution providers. Many of these partners have built large portions of their business on doing traditional "systems integration", helping their customers make sense of many layers of the technology stack. With much of that work being collapsed by these new cloud services, these partners are moving towards creating industry or vertical market solutions that establish a new differentiation for their companies in the marketplace. Not only do these solutions offer built in application functionality inherent to the industry but also include pre-defined integration processes to a number of different Cloud and premised based endpoints.

Responding to these changes is having a profound effect on the businesses of ISVs as well as implementation partners. The most obvious is the profit and cash flow impact of the subscription model versus the old software and maintenance model. It certainly does not stop there however. How do implementation partners re-work the skills and talents of their work force to meet the new demands of our customers? How do we provide better tools to support these new demands? How do implementation partners become adept at creating and packaging IP? How do both ISVs and implementation partners look beyond selling software to the delivering an entire end to end user experience? How do we address the operational issues around upgrading and supporting solutions? I could go on and on.

On November 7^th, 2011, I will be participating in a panel at the Cloud Channel Summit entitled "Building Effective Cloud Channels: What's Working and What's Not". This should be a very lively and informative discussion as each of the panelists is wrestling with this question in their own business. While each of the panelists will bring their own insights and ideas around how to build these channels, the broader macro level issues outlined above will be the lens by which they should be evaluated. Addressing this important issue of collaboration between ISVs and implementation partners is critical to the broader adoption of Cloud services. I look forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing the ideas of my contemporaries.

Integrating Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint

2011-10-13T16:01:56-04:00

As a Sales Engineer at Scribe, I get many questions about Scribe capability in specific integration scenarios. One such question is how we can integrate Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint. In this post, I provide an overview of how I managed to integrate these two systems, some of the tools I had to use, and some of the pitfalls I ran into. I used the Scribe Adapter for Web Services and the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics CRM 2011 when designing this integration. I hope this helps shed some light on how this integration can work between these two systems.

Adapter for Web Services

This adapter is a generic connection to SOAP based web services provided by Scribe. It allows Insight to utilize many SOAP based web services that are publicly available, and also allows you to create your own in order to access legacy systems with poor or no database structure. You can utilize this to either pull or push data to the back end systems, as it exposes all the methods and parameters for the particular WSDL you are using. This adapter also exposes some additional configuration that can be used to streamline your integration design, like providing default values to parameters that can be overridden, logon and logoff methods, as well as error capturing using Regular Expressions.

SharePoint Web Services

Microsoft SharePoint has a very well documented web service back end to assist you in integrating with it. It is not just one web service, but instead a collection of roughly 21 separate WSDL endpoints that allow you to manage and manipulate data. When starting with these SharePoint web services I highly recommend utilizing MSDN for help on how to work with the web services as it is very well documented, gives you code samples that you can utilize to figure out what type of data needs to be passed in, and teaches you what each method does. SharePoint also has a unique way of working with separate sites and its web services. Instead of giving you just those 21 web service endpoints, if you have 3 separate sites built within SharePoint, you get 63 separate end points, 21 for each site. This makes it very easy to distinguish what the particular web service connection is being used for, removing all ambiguity from the integration design. In my case, I did two separate integrations, one for Help Desk tickets and one for Marking Campaigns, which had two separate sites in SharePoint. When I created my connections to the web services, I could see right inside the URL what site I was connecting to.

Integration Overview

The integration that I will overview here is a Marketing Campaign integration, bringing Campaign data down to SharePoint lists. This includes not only the core data about the Campaign, but any related marketing material as attachments. The use case behind this scenario is that a company has users who need access to marketing material such as PowerPoint templates, email drafts, and white papers, but who do not have access to Dynamics CRM. This integration allows those users to utilize the corporate SharePoint server to gain access to materials that were previously only available inside Dynamics CRM.

When approaching this integration, several decisions had to be made up front about how this should run. I decided to make this a real time one way integration using Queue based integrations so that the data could be presented as soon as changes are made, and it would make use of multi-threading. In order to do this, I had to work outside of the box a bit. Because I need to bring all attachment data to SharePoint, I had to have a direct connection to my CRM system. This means that I could not just use the XML message as the source of my DTS file. So, to overcome this I used a Prompted Variable to capture the GUID of the campaign I was working with, and fed that into my source query using XPATH. That allows me to extract that CampaignID value from the XML that triggered the integration, and feed it into the source query at run time, giving me not only the campaign I care about, but also the attachments that come with it.

So, this setup will allow me to use a real time, multi-threaded integration, but I do not have to use XML as the source of the DTS file in order to make this happen.

Now, within the setup of the job itself there are some complex formulas that must be used in order to work with the SharePoint web services. There is the concept of an xmlAny attribute, which is how data must be sent to SharePoint. This attribute allows me to send in a piece of XML with field information and values to match what fields exist in SharePoint. It must be done this way because SharePoint is so easily customizable there is no way for the web service to constantly be re-configuring itself to display all the fields you are adding/changing within SharePoint. By using Scribe formulas to create XML header and node information, I am able to pass in whatever fields are available at that time, and if I need to make a change to add/remove a field, I simply alter the XML I am passing in. As you can see in the screen shot, I was able to create calculated variables which contained XML node information and data, and concatenate them together with XML header information to present a large block of XML with a minimal amount of data in my formula.

Another aspect in dealing with the SharePoint web service is working with return values. Much as is with passing data into SharePoint as XML, the values you receive from SharePoint are also formatted as XML. So, instead of creating formulas to stitch together XML, we must now find a way to parse the XML and locate the values we are looking for. I did this using text functions like FIND() and MID(), in order to locate the nodes I cared about, and get just that value from the XML. I could then use this in subsequent steps.

There are many more design details to this integration that can be found in our latest video within the Inside Track, if you would like to view this new video but are not yet a subscriber of the Inside Track, you can register for a free trial here using the registration code "InsideTrackTrial". For those of you who have already subscribed, there should be a new book on your shelf titled Integrating Dynamics CRM and SharePoint.