I am pleased to announce the upcoming release of Scribe Insight 7.0!
As you may know from previous blog postings (see "Breaking the SOURCE-TARGET Paradigm") and webinars, Scribe has been hard at work at a major Insight release, code named "Steelhead", since mid-2009. As we took stock of features and changes that will be included in the release, it became very apparent that Steelhead represents the most significant enhancement to the Scribe Insight product since the release of Scribe Insight 6.0. You may have seen the Steelhead release referred to as Scribe Insight 6.6. Belay that! In recognition of the significance of this release, henceforth Steelhead will be known as Scribe Insight 7.0.
Scribe Insight 7.0 represents a significant leap forward in the capabilities of Scribe Insight. The most significant feature is multi-target. Scribe Insight has historically been the tool of choice when you need to integrate data between one source and one target system. With Scribe Insight 7.0, you will have the capability to connect to multiple target systems. Why would you want to do this? Let me talk briefly about several possible scenarios.
Closed-Loop Integrations
You will be able to use your source system to be a target as well. This opens up the ability to have truly closed-loop integrations. Users have traditionally used the "update source" feature to accomplish this. Update source will still be available in Insight 7.0. However, update source does have some limitations for which a multi-target approach may provide a better option. For example,
- If the source record was triggered via a publisher, then the update source feature is not available since the source for that DTS is a message queue and not the original application which triggered the integration.
- The source system uses an adapter which does not support the update source feature.
- The source query is a complex join which update source cannot not support.
- You need to be able to update multiple fields on the source record.
All of these scenarios are enabled by the multi-target feature. By adding the source system as a target in your DTS, you can leverage all the power of Scribe Insight to perform upon the source whichever operations you require.
Figure 1 -- Using multi-target to update the source application
Consider the scenario represented by Figure 1 above. This integration synchronizes account records when they are created in a CRM system into an ERP system. To accomplish this, the integration detects new accounts created in the CRM system using a publisher. Those events are published to a message queue, which is picked up by an Integration process and written to the ERP system. When creating the record in the ERP system, an account number is assigned. The field on the record in the source system should be updated with the ERP systems account number. Additionally, a status field on the account record should be updated in the CRM system indicating the integration successfully ran or if an error occurred. In the event of an error, the error message should be written to a separate field on the CRM record. With Insight 7.0, all of this can be accomplished using a single DTS.
Utilize Web Services as Part of Your Integration Process
You can utilize services as part of your integration. For example, consider the scenario shown in the figure 2.
Figure 2 - Using Web Services to call out to Web Services within an integration
In this scenario, when loading an account record from your CRM system into your ERP system, you need to call out to a third party web service to retrieve the credit rating for that company and associate it to customer record in the ERP system. This integration is possible using out-of-the-box Insight 7.0 functionality in conjunction with our Web Services adapter.
Alternatively, perhaps your focus is on data integrity. As part of that, you want to review all the contact records in your CRM system, using an address validation web service to fix address errors. This scenario is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 - Data cleanup using a web service
Again, using a combination of standard Scribe Insight with multi-target along with our Web Services adapter, this scenario is now possible.
Integrations Involving More Than Two Systems
At Scribe we have multiple systems that must remain in sync. For example, if a user is created in the web store, we must create that same user in our Support Web system as well as our CRM system.
Figure 4 -- Integrate multiple applications
In addition to multi-target, Insight 7.0 will address a number of other features based directly on the feedback from our partners and users, including:
- OpenMind idea #7: Allow multiple target connections
- OpenMind idea #66: Allow lookup into a database outside of the source, internal, or target.
- OpenMind idea #139: Start new message processors only if a reasonable amount of system resources are available
- OpenMind idea #142: Using Update Source with Custom Queries
- OpenMind idea #156: Improve the update source functionality to not be so quirky
- OpenMind idea #163: Support for Failover on Windows 2008
- OpenMind idea #178: Allow ability to turn off Auto-Foreign Key Assignment
- OpenMind idea #187: Add ability to disable auto foreign key assignment
- OpenMind idea #215: Update multiple source fields
- OpenMind idea #239: Always create the MSMQs if they are not there when the MessageServer starts
- OpenMind idea #249: Place "something" on the screen while Workbench is starting
- OpenMind idea #280: Add support for Windows 7
- OpenMind idea #306: Workbench Test Dialog should remember the current window state
- OpenMind idea #323: Support Windows 2008 R2
Scribe Insight 7 is scheduled for release in June 2010.
We hope you are as excited by Insight 7.0 as we are. I look forward to your comments and feedback.
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