EXTOL Business Integration Blog

When I think about integration, the first thing that comes to mind is application to application integration (A2A).  Gartner states that application integration aims to make independently designed application systems work together.   Their definition applies to my interpretation of A2A integration, which is the connection of disparate applications both inside and outside the firewall, regardless of location (including the Cloud).  This interpretation includes integration between a few or many applications and encompasses all integration aspects such as, communications and messaging, translation and transformation, routing, process automation, data access and even extends to application access.  This can apply to scenarios such as transaction replication or process activation across applications, providing web access to legacy applications and publishing information to mobile devices.  Most of the integrations between these disparate applications used to occur by means of proprietary APIs, messaging or a combination of both.  This can still be the case, but a larger percentage of integration today is mediated by integration middleware or via web services. Read more…

With more mission-critical applications such as CRMs and ERPs moving to the Cloud, the integration landscape is changing.  But what’s the degree of change?  Is it really changing that much or have the mediations (services that connect the internal and external processes) simply changed to support different data packaging, communication protocols and activation methods while continuing to perform the same functionality?  If your  integration toolset can’t adapt to these changes, you’ll have to  rebuild your integrations.

Let’s consider current real-world  use cases: integration using a premise-to-Cloud implementation and integration within the Cloud such as Cloud-to-on-premise or Cloud-to-Cloud.  Even though the endpoints are different and cross system boundaries, the base mediation involved is simple: Read more…

EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI):

Question: How can I set a fixed length for wrapping Outbound EDI document contents?

Answer: Does your trading partner require the lines of data inside of the Outbound EDI documents you are sending to them to have fixed wrapping at a specific length?  In EDI, the term “Fixed Wrapped” refers to EDI data formatted so that there is a new line repeatedly at a fixed number of characters throughout the document.

The procedure to do this inside of EBI is actually very simple. All you need to do is go to the Target EDI Endpoint responsible for wrapping the EDI data for this particular trading partner. Select the ‘Target’ tab and find the “Enable Fixed Wrapping” checkbox. Checking this will enable the “Fixed Wrap Length” setting next to it. This is where you can enter what the length of the lines inside of your Outbound EDI document will be according to your trading partner’s request. Saving the EDI Endpoint after this will immediately enable the software to wrap the data accordingly.”

EXTOL EDI Integrator for i (EEI)

Question:  How can I use data areas to set defaults for mailroom dates, sorting, and job logging?

Answer:

• EXWRKCNNDY – Sets the default date for Connections listing when you go to Mailroom, Work with Connections

If you enter a 0.00000000 in the data area, the starting date when you go into the Mailroom, Work with Connections will be the current date. If you enter 1.000000000, the starting date in the Mailroom, Work with Connections will be yesterday, if you enter 2.0000000 the starting date will be the day before yesterday, etc….

• EXCONNDFT – EXTOL default Ascending/Descending view for Work with Connections
  • An ‘A’ will sort the mailroom so that the Newest Connections are at the bottom and the oldest at the Top.
  • A ‘D’ will sort the mailroom so that the Newest Connections are at the top and the oldest at the bottom.

• EXDBG – Changing the second position to a ‘Y’ will generate additional job logs for debugging purposes.

**Note – remember to turn this data area off after debugging problems, as keeping this on will result in excess job logs being created on your system.

EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI)

Question: If I’ve forgotten the name of an Application or EDI Endpoint for a specific Trading Partner, is there a way to find it?

Answer: You can use the ‘Endpoint Search’ feature to find them using values specific to a Trading Partner. Follow these steps:

- At the bottom of the ‘Endpoints’ tab inside of the EBI Workbench, click the first button on the left to bring up the search window.

- Select the endpoint type from the dropdown menu at the top of the window. This will display all of the fields available within that endpoint category.

- From there, you can enter the specific criteria for a Trading Partner, such as Sender/Receiver ID.

- To turn off your search filter, simply click the second button from the left at the bottom of the ‘Endpoint’ tab.

EXTOL Secure Exchange (ESX)

Question: How do I republish an outbound document from ESX?

Answer: To republish an outbound document from ESX, you first right click on the specified session and choose publish to, outgoing channel. Next, select the outgoing channel that is attached to the partnership that you want this document republished to, and click ok.

* Note: Make sure this outgoing channel is not selected on multiple partnerships. Otherwise, this document will go to all the partnerships the outgoing channel is selected on.

I was recently driving while listening intently to a radio program as a woman described her inability to survive each day without her Blackberry.  I recalled how years earlier I was able to enjoy my twenty-seventh consecutive year of attending the first round of NCAA’s “March Madness” because I had implemented similar survival techniques and had email available at my fingertips.

This year I returned to the phone outlet and found my Blackberry to be far outdated.  There were phones with a “bling” for this…and a “jingle” for that.  These were electronic office assistants that also doubled as high quality cameras.  Storage capacities were available that rivaled hardware ten times their size, perfect for catching that otherwise useless video moment.  As if my favorite 250 songs weren’t enough, I had an option to carry them all.  I was certain at some point I would be approached by a stranger asking if I might just have Tiny Tim’s, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” available for immediate play. Read more…