I love Integration Manager. I hate Integration Manager. Repeat.
I've been working on a bunch of integrations, some with IM. I continued to love the flexibility of the IM interface. The ability to transform data without having to make adjustments to the source is just phenomenal. It's so much better than the standard rigid Excel/CSV formats from other products. With VBA and all the little things like substitution tables and easy capitalization I actually have a lot of good things to say about IM.
If someone would fix the gripes, they'd have a phenomenal product. By gripes, I don't mean stability either. With v10 GP pulled out the SQL adapters and replaced them with econnect adapters. ehh. I was hoping the econnect adapters would fix the biggest single issue the SQL connector had but they don't. None of the high speed connectors contains every single possible field for integration. Why is this so hard?
My goal was today was two integrations that will need to be automated, namely, new customers and orders. I wanted the econnect adapters because I can put them in a group and automate the group without firing off the interface. Customers went fine. SOP should be fine, except that for very good business reasons, I need the items to come in as Quotes. Low and behold, the IM econnect adapters for SOP don't support Quotes, just Orders and Invoices.
I felt screwed, and not in a good way. That's not the only missing field or option in the SOP integration, it's just the one I really needed.
Understand that I don't even care that the connections can be flaky. Crystal is that way as is FRx, but moving the whole enchilada to an econnect back end AND INCLUDING EVERY FREAKING FIELD would really improve IM. I'm not sure what the point of the SQL optimized to econnect back end change was if there is no improvement in available fields.
So, I love IM and I hate IM. I hate IM because I see so much unrealized potential. It's like a kid who can't see their phenomenal potential. Somebody please get IM out of puberty and into a grown up app.
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3 comments:
Amen to the above! I have been frustrated so many times by the same thing. The product has so much potential and does some things so well - why not go all the way with exposing all the fields/values?!?!?!
I have felt your pain in the past and can empathize.
Great post - keep up the good work!
Yeah integration manager really has a lot of issues, speed, stability, and missing fields.
I would suggest using SQL Server Integration Services in combination with the Dynamics GP SSIS Toolkit.
With SSIS you can customize every aspect of the integration with .NET code if you wanted to but most of the out of the box adapters will get you what you need such as event logging, email functionality, automated webservice and FTP interaction etc.
The toolkit integrates all the business objects that are supported by eConnect and is 1/5 the cost of integration manager or Scribe.
The Dynamics GP SSIS Toolkit can be purchased here:
www.keelio.com
I have had some great success and also some great challenges with Integration Manager as well. I would like to learn more about it in the future. I recently just had a customer/order integration application I developed and learned quite a bit about the IM interface, what's required, what's not required, etc. Great product. I am at the end of the integration and wanted to see if I could get some help from you guys. I need to add the Integration as a shortcut to GP in the Navigation Shortcut menu. However, when clicking the shortcut it tells me it can't find the file. I checked the location and it indeed does exist. Any suggestions? Thanks for the article.
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