Thursday, June 11, 2015

Customizations & Workarounds

With the growth of online applications integrations between systems have become increasingly critical. We receive several requests for customization as would most software providers. We add these features on an ongoing basis depending on urgency and value to the overall system. The good news is that as long as new features are on "our platform" we have the flexibility to do what it takes to design and implement pretty much any feature. We also provide open APIs to our system so if any other application providers wish to integrate with our platform we provide them all the support they need. However, when customers want us to integrating our platform with other solutions it is important that other systems provide open APIs for us to integrate. When not  available, we have to jump through hoops and develop workarounds.

Recently, we had a prospect who had a need to integrate our platform with Live Meeting. Unfortunately, live meeting APIs don't lend themselves to integration with other web apps.  After discussions with the customer we devised a workable solutions. The end-user can register for a Live Meeting session or a Live Meeting series from our platform and get access to a link. On clicking this link the user is taken to a Live Meeting site where the user can join a live session after registration/logging in. This step is a manual process because APIs are unavailable. The Admin can generate reports about registrations for these live session from our platform. We also added the ability for the end user to pay for these registrations using credit cards.

The Admin can also generate payment reports for these sessions.  Then, we extended the Live Sessions feature to Live Series --essentially a grouping of  live sessions along with the associated reports. Unfortunately, this is the best we could provide given that the APIs simply aren't available for  us to do more. Nevertheless, we have happy customer with a solution that works! We'll admit, its not perfect, but it works.