THE NEWS INFORMATION FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Summer 2013 | VOLUME 25

Program Update

CGI Advantage Business Integration: enhancing scalability, availability and integration management

CGI Advantage Business Integration (ABI) provides a robust unified integration framework to exchange data between CGI Advantage ERP and external systems. In Release 3.10, many features have been added to ABI to enhance scalability, availability and integration management such as:

  • Integration Manager. The most important enhancement made to ABI is the Integration Manager. Integration Manager is a web application to configure, manage and troubleshoot CGI Advantage integrations. The Integration Manger enables system administrators to monitor and troubleshoot integrations in a centralized repository leveraging reports and logs. A few key capabilities of the Integration Manager are highlighted below:
FeatureCapabilityBenefits to System Administrators
ConfigurationIntegration Manager facilitates configuring integration of CGI Advantage ERP with third party applications.
  • Configure new integration services to CGI Advantage or modify existing services, by making use of pre-defined templates and easy to use configuration forms provided in the Integration Manager
Scheduling and RunningIntegration services can be initiated via the Integration Manager or can also be scheduled by scheduler applications that support web-services.
  • Execute integrations upon request
  • Execute integrations automatically according to a pre-defined schedule through a scheduler
PollingA polling capability is included as part of Integration Manager that will allow integration services to pick-up input files automatically from a specified directory for the integration.
  • Allow system administrators to maintain an input directory where users can drop input files for specific integrations
  • Polling frequency per integration is configurable via the Integration Manager
Troubleshooting and Error HandlingIntegration execution reports can be viewed in the Integration Manager. Each integration execution generates a processing log which can be viewed to monitor and troubleshoot integrations. Log files can be viewed from hyperlinks embedded in log entries.
  • Display status of integration execution real-time
  • Allow the administrator to monitor status and troubleshoot integration issues via log entries from current and completed integration services
NotificationA notification capability is included which can be configured to send email notifications to system administrators and stakeholders, based on parameters set for each integration.
  • System Administrators can be immediately notified via email if there are unsuccessful integration executions and technical issues that should be investigated
  • Status of integrations can be automatically sent via email to the business owners, so they can follow-up with the technical support staff
  • File-based integration. ABI has the capability to support file-based integrations. A number of file processing services are pre-packaged and delivered with Release 3.10 to support integrations with the Kronos product.
  • Scalable Architecture. ABI comes with highly scalable architecture having multiple server support capability to achieve load balancing resulting in improved system performance. Apache ZooKeeper and LinkedIn's Project Norbert have been leveraged to achieve server clustering at application level.

If you would like more information on CGI Advantage Business Integration (ABI), please contact Prasanna Ramakrishnan at prasanna.ramakrishnan@cgi.com.