System integration tasks for complex workflows

For each integration project, we select the technology that meets the customer’s requirements in the best way. The team considers the complexity of integration, cost of ownership, options for the customer’s IT specialists or business analysts to modify the integration components as well as system requirements such as operating system, memory, and so on. Let’s read about just some cases. 

Integration with NetDocuments and creation of the new web-based tools

WaveAccess completed a series of solutions that work with NetDocuments and use its API.

Helpdesk tool

A web-based solution for administrators of NetDocuments’ repositories allows for the managing of documents within workspaces: check-in of documents, security setup, auditing, and viewing history. The application is based on .NET and connects to NetDocuments API directly, using a database for storage of user data and app settings only. 

Dashboard tool to measure business performance

WaveAccess has created a web-based application to demonstrate the performance of the client’s company in terms of how many documents employees create and file, showing detailed statistics per firm, per office, or per employee. The application utilizes both NetDocuments API to get documents count and the firm's own database to compare data against users.

Document exporting tool

With this WPF-based desktop tool, users can easily select necessary documents or even whole workspaces/folders applying filters and utilizing powerful search capabilities, then export them to a destination folder. At the same time, users can set a new name format for documents queued for export using templates. The tool also allows exporting the original folder structure as well. The application doesn’t need any database and can be installed on any Windows machine with no additional setup, and it supports SSO authentication.

Document importing tool

Similar to the Exporting tool, this solution allows importing thousands of documents from Microsoft Exchange and local drives to NetDocuments. Before our development of this new exporting tool, every day our client’s employees would import hundreds of documents to cloud-based DMS systems but the majority of these systems didn't allow users to upload a large amount of data fast and easily. Now thanks to our solution it works effortlessly and more efficiently.

The WaveAccess team created a special software based on WPF that uses NetDocuments API. It allows users to fill in all necessary document attributes before importing, and then upload hundreds of thousands of files in a reasonable time.

The app supports a bulk import from *.CSV files as well as the regular import of MS Office documents and *.PDF files directly from local drives and mailboxes of users (via Microsoft Exchange Web Services API). 

Integration of a Document Management System Client application into Microsoft Office Applications and Adobe Acrobat

There are some companies that work with hundreds of documents daily (for example, in the Finance, Banking, and Construction industries). Such companies store these documents in a web service accessible for every partner, associate, or assistant. Some of those documents are content-sensitive and are not to be seen by some groups of users. And, of course, every document needs versioning. While all documents need to be located in central storage, employees prefer working in their favorite Microsoft Office applications.

WaveAccess has completed a comprehensive DMS with a modern-looking UI written using Angular 2, in one example a major US-based company, covering all its business processes: a DMS featuring versioning, security, folders management, and other needs. The specifics of our client is that they are on a very tight schedule: specialists receive and send dozens of emails a day, read and edit documents of various formats and make annotations. They simply don’t have time to switch between applications.

WaveAccess has made it possible to stay in a single application and work with DMS from there with no extra movements by creating special MS Office plugins (add-ins) that are installed for each user separately or centralized through silent installation using Active Directory capabilities. The plugins are based on WPF and utilize WebApi on the DMS side.

Every email received by an employee can be filed to DMS in a few clicks directly from within MS Outlook. The specialists can also automatically file an outgoing email to DMS in a single click, as well as save attachments not on a local drive but into DMS directly. Every email or attachment can be set up in a way so that unauthorized people will not have access to it.

When it comes to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint applications, WaveAccess has customized the standard menu and embedded custom buttons specific to the DMS. With this help, employees can open documents from DMS (check out), make changes or simply view them, and then save them back to DMS (check in).

The same is valid for numerous *.PDF documents which are mostly incoming scans. Employees need to make many annotations on each of them and save them into DMS. PDF files are really important for this client, so we have completed the integration with Adobe Acrobat, allowing the same functionality through a different integration technology.

This whole solution allowed the client’s employees to save dozens of hours of routine work, and made the work much more convenient and fast.

Complex rules of data transfer (Banking and other apps)

Often the data from a source system should be passed either to one or to another target system depending on some specific rules. These rules, or ‘conditions’, may include the data itself or some external parameters. Data formats and protocols for interaction with the target systems may also be different. Or the opposite situation is also possible when the data from several source systems should be collected and passed to the target system as a whole.

We solved exactly this kind of integration using scripts. It allows us to handle data from various sources, analyze it, and collect it in a single package before passing it to a target system. For example, data from *.CSV files downloaded from sFTP is combined with data from the accounting system (connected via an MS SQL stage database), and transferred to a financial system via RabbitMQ message broker. 

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Images: Unsрlash (Karolina Grabowska, Markus Sрiske, Kamрus Рroduction).  

Feel free to read the previous article to learn about integrations with closed systems using the Wave.Integrate platform.