The Integration Solution
It all begins with a solution. How do I integrate my online store with my back end ERP?
Do I need to reenter all data? But then it means that we will need more resource in terms of both machines and manpower and of course money.
The initial challenges started from the fact that there were loads of eCommerce applications and so were the ERP apps. Moreover, most of them were built in different languages.
Imagine trying to communicate with a person who speaks Spanish and you can’t.
SBOeConnect, which started 2 years back as a solution to a client issue has today grown into a large application which provides a tightly coupled integration between SAP B1 and Magento eCommerce.
Though the initial choice was easy, we just had to choose amongst the large number of existing ERP’s and eCommerce applications, communication was a real challenge for us. As you all know, Magento is a web based application, built using PHP and MySQL and SAP Business One is windows based.
We begun by using an xml based flat file integration to get data from Magento and com objects to get data from SAP, but then that was 2 years back, nearly. At that point of time Magento had just introduced web services.
This solution came with few of issues like absence of accurate data and the historical data integration and thus when we planned the 2.0 version of our application. SOAP based web service was an obvious choice over XML RPC for the data transfer. This is because SOAP provided a versatile solution to transfer data over different protocols as compared to XML RPC which is similar to a plain XML transfer.
Even the whole architecture of the system was restructured. It was now
divide into modules and classes based on the functions. The strategy design pattern, which allowed us to keep the processes
separated, not only helped us to make the architecture scalable but also made the code more dynamic.
Now customizations in code never meant changes in the core product, but it meant adding a new part to the code.
We soon realized that the default web services provided by Magento were not enough and thus we developed our custom web services. This helped us to easily fetch data, whatever we require in a secured way.
A huge amount of time was also spent to give it a new look and feel.
SBOeconnect has evolved today into a big application.
It not only sports a good UI but it has around 26 points of integration including Customer, Product and Order synchronization.
