This chapter is a logical continuation to Chapter 6, which presented various solutions to extend the Google Apps solution. When performing advanced integration of Google Apps into the IS, third-party applications or extensions are often the best choice. This chapter presents a selection of three products we think are particularly representative of this approach. All of them are readily available on the Google Marketplace.
The online availability of data and tools in the cloud is not always enough in an enterprise context. On the one hand, the Web 2.0 implies that users contribute to the information system. On the other, enterprise computing implies constraints that mainstream computing does not have.
Enterprise "mashups" offer a solution to these limitations. They combine ideas from the web 2.0, from SOA and from enterprise computing. They can be roughly defined as composite applications, connected to the IS (both internal and external), that the users set up themselves. They are equivalent in their design to the more classical mashups that everybody already uses (like iGoogle or Netvibes for instance), but they can combine general public widgets and widgets connected to enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, SCM, SFA). Mashups go beyond what portals can offer because widgets are able to interact with each other and thus can automate workflows and data transfer.
Most enterprise applications, however, were not designed to be integrated in mashups. Mainframe applications or older web applications rely mainly on older protocols defined long before SOAP or REST and moreover they don't make their data available in any structured format based on XML. Connecting to these enterprise systems requires both knowledge of the topology of the IS and development skills (web programming, project management, configuration management).
This is why Convertigo proposes two "studios" that are briefly presented below.
The first studio targets corporate developers who can connect to existing applications, even those that publish neither any APIs, nor any structured data. This studio allows capturing, filtering, and transforming data and associated business logic. It allows publishing these resources as widgets that can be integrated in these mashups or as web services that any SOA applications can consume.
The second studio, targeted at business users, allows them to compose various widgets into enterprise mashups. No technical prerequisites are needed, widgets can be combined graphically. The Google Apps suite can use these widgets and the web services published by Convertigo to integrate them with enterprise applications. This can be done by synchronizing the information between the enterprise IS and the Google Apps. It can also be integrated via iGoogle (using Convertigo widget) or even via new, specific applications developed with Google's frameworks and tools.
Let us use a concrete example to illustrate these possibilities. Convertigo is currently used in a large European insurance company, which chose Google Apps as a collaboration platform. It helps this company to synchronize an idea management application with Google Docs.
The idea-management package is a web application offered in SaaS mode by a software vendor. This application has no integration APIs.
The Convertigo solution is deployed in the Cloud as well and thus maintains the coherence of the architecture.
One of the advantages of the Convertigo solution is that it enables access to the idea management package from mobile devices.
One of the advantages of the Convertigo solution is that it allows connection to the idea-management package using mobile devices
Using the Convertigo Studio made it possible to capture the needed information in the pages of the package and to make them available in the Google Apps as new web services (as seen in the following screenshot). The system provides two-way functionality because the Convertigo technology can also work in update mode. This is possible because Convertigo maintains a connection with the original application from which it captures the screen contents. This way, all business logic and data validation remain fully operational.
Finally, the captured data is assembled in an enterprise mashup that gathers several widgets related to promoting new business ideas, and that allows collaborative thinking based on them. This is actually a brainstorming platform in the cloud.
The information gathered is assembled in an enterprise mashup that aggregates several widgets
In the future, Convertigo will offer a component library that wraps Google's API in order to generate mashups even more quickly by combining these Google components with other public or commercial widgets while supporting interactions and complex navigation between all these components.