Brian,
All good points. I agree, Service Connect is better than nothing.
If you are a Vantage Progress-based customer, then this is a wonderful
and welcomed tool. If you're SQL, it's antiquated and unnecessary IMHO.
If someone was truly looking for flexibility and scalability in Vantage,
then ultimately SQL was/is the only way to go. MS SQL is a common
denominator of any enterprise app or tool.
I can't think of any cute analogies at the moment, but for ultimate
flexibility and scalability, a Vantage customer should be on SQL.
Let me reiterate: for *Progress* customers out there you really don't
have much of a choice and Service Connect is great because it offers you
that flexibility. But for SQL customers, using Service Connect is like
putting an elevator in an outhouse... it just doesn't belong there. :-)
(there's my analogy)
But, Brian, you are correct in saying Service Connect is a great tool
for Progress users.
Vic
-----Original Message-----
From:
vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Brian W. Spolarich
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 9:45 AM
To:
vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Vantage] Service Connect for CAD?
Vic, I can't speak to the reason for having two pieces of middleware
(obviously non-ideal), but I can guess maybe because Pro.File uses
BizTalk as its integration layer, and Epicor uses ServiceConnect, and so
this is the most straightforward way to integrate the two without lots
of customization.
You've commented a couple of times now that you're unhappy with
Epicor's architectural choice of using ServiceConnect as the middleware
piece, both in terms of its proprietary nature and its presence instead
of having integrations be done based on direct database triggers and the
like.
Speaking for myself, I can say fairly strongly that I wouldn't have
purchased Vantage if Epicor's strategy was to "put everything in the
database". It is exactly these abstraction layers that give Vantage the
flexibility that I'm going to want moving forward to integrate with
other applications and systems. Having a method for automating the
invocation of the business logic of the system is essential. I've spent
too much time in the past trying to decipher and reverse-engineer
complex database table structures for applications I've inherited.
While there is overhead to this layered approach, I'd rather have that
then the alternative of a tightly-coupled system that completely locks
me in to dealing with one vendor and few possibilities for customization
or integration.
I also don't see Service Connect as being *that* proprietary. It is
just a web services orchestration engine. There are others, and you
could use those to talk to and invoke the Vantage web services if you
don't like Epicor's tool. Obviously you need it for your particular
third-party application, but its not some strange thing. If you're
going to expose web services that invokes your system's API, you're
going to need a tool like Service Connect to make that API useful to
people.
-bws
--
Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services ~ Advanced Photonix /
Picometrix
bspolarich@... ~ 734-864-5618 ~
www.advancedphotonix.com
From:
vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of Vic Drecchio
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 9:19 AM
To:
vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Vantage] Service Connect for CAD?
Bill,
1) No. Not at all. We just chose to go with Epicor's offering for PLM
and it came with ProFILE and all the necessary basic Service Connect
workflows.
2) Here's the way the software architects set up PLM:
PLM <--> MSBizTalk <--> Service Connect <--> Vantage
For some reason they couldn't omit the use of MS BizTalk and it is used
as PLM's liason to Service Connect. Two middlewares.... doesn't make
sense to me either.
PLM is always SQL based. We are a SQL customer for Vantage. It would
have made more sense like this:
PLM <--> SQL <--> Vantage
This data interchange could have all been accomplished via triggers and
stored procs. This linkage, and it's required troubleshooting, is
exhausting.
Since you are Progress, Service Connect should be your choice of getting
data in/out of Vantage. I'm not a big fan of Service Connect due to it's
learning curve and I loathe learning proprietary software tools. Where
else in the IT industry will you see Service Connect? Nowhere.
.
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