Day 2 - PM
Posted by bsstahl on 2003-05-30 and Filed Under: event
The final session of Wednesday dealt with one of the most important issues technology managers have to deal with today, the problem of system integration. How can we take many disparate systems and connect them seamlessly to one another? Fortunately, we now have bodies such as the W3C defining sets of standards that we all can use to ensure the interconnectivity of our applications. For example, the Work Order System that I helped to develop at the Port Authority of Allegheny County uses XML transported via a SOAP interface (both W3C standards) to expose methods for creating work orders to external systems such as scanning systems and the onboard bus computers. These interfaces are available to any application regardless of platform. The application also supports the COM interface provided by PeopleSoft as gateway into the PeopleSoft Financials module. COM is a proprietary, binary standard from Microsoft and is therefore not generally recommended, however it does allow for a low-overhead interface between applications running on the Windows platform. In the Port Authority's Work Order System, we used this interface to connect to inventory, often allowing the partsroom attendants to have materials ready and waiting for maintenance personell and preventing the scheduling of non-critical work where parts are not yet available.