Opinion Wanted - Integration with custom App

[architect3145]

We have an app in-house that runs against MS SQL Server that needs CRM functionality which requires linking into the customer, salesperson, and order tables. The in-house staff has dev experience with RoR, Java, and PHP. Has anyone been down a similar path? How did it turn out?

[sapmin]

We've been through this twice. Both times we decided not to write programs for the interfaces, and instead use a tool for the integration. We've successfully setup bidirectional synchronization by identifying the 'owning' system for each piece of data. For example, Account Name is coming from the ERP system, and any changes made on the Sugar side are overwritten. The ERPs run in either Oracle or MSSQL and Sugar is running MySql in both.

The tool we used is Jitterbit, but there are several other ETL (Extract Translate Load) tools out there. We schedule it to run every minute, only processing records that have changed since the last run. It's efficient, fast, and reliable.

If you'd like more details feel free to ask.

[agcopley]

Hi there,
I have done uni-directional synchronization using Talend Open studio...basically I created a series of db triggers on the sugar side, which uploaded the change delta into a separate table, monitored by a Talend process running every minute. The talend process transforms the data and then uploads to the target application. Talend also comes with Sugar adaptors which speed things up a bit, though I am not convinced about their reliability.

No problems whatsoevera and it is very easy to atomise the transactions in an external integration product like talend or jitterbit.

Andrew