Regardless of the organization's need to make a profit. There is always a need for partnerships to improve existing businesses, partnerships are carried out through market development, bundling business collaboration, and technology integration. In this post, we will discuss how technology integration is part of the key to the success of industry 4.0. Today's technology integration has at least three characteristics. The first characteristic is to follow standards. Integration standards will encourage how one business with other businesses greet and collaborate with each other. The second karasteristic is the common development technology. Organizations on the basis of developing microservices for example will be easier to coordinate with other organizations that have similarities. The third characteristic is the alignment of business processes. For example, logistics business processes are very close to sales business processes. The two business processes will be very likely to be integrated because businesses support each other. Then what technologies are commonly used for integration. Following are three development models that encourage integration.
Web services. Web services. this old technology is still combined with newer technology. For example, SOAP-based web services are still used for compatibility. The xml-based web services are now starting to use simple protocols such as REST. The REST protocol that is quite simple is now widely used with a simpler data format than XML, namely JSON.
Microservices. Unlike the high level API SOA. Microservice emphasizes a low level API approach. In other words, for a simple process there are interfaces that can be used separately in a process. For example, if SOA is discussing credit card payment validation, microservices provides an API to validate details idenetification of the master card / visa / amx card.
low codes integration. this approach is widely used by business users who want to do a technology orchestra. like wanting to post social media to Twitter when a post on Instagram exceeds 100 likes. This system is widely available in the market for digital marketing needs to business automation. Examples of this technology such as Microsoft Flow.
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Thus, the three technologies that characterize integration in the modern era. Has something been missed? let's share here
Imagine that you want to automate your daily task such as uploading an attachment from an email to your OneDrive. In the past, you can do that by creating an app and then use the provided API. Those tasks can only happen if you have a programming skill. But today, the communication between one service to the other services can be easily implemented with Microsoft Flow technology. Microsoft Technology helps you to integrate several services into one service that might be useful for you or for your team. Some of the productivity scenario that I like such as:
Creating a planner task based on an email that I flagged in
On approval from our manager, copy the file from SharePoint into my work OneDrive
Get Push Notification if my boss uploaded a new file to my mobile
The concept of Microsoft Flow is simple. They define the three component of the flow which are
My Flow – your Flow Creation
Connector – a service that can communicate with the other services.
Template – a ready to use flow that combines several connectors
Just imagine, you have more than 150 services with more than 250 templates. You can visit the Microsoft Flow on flow.microsoft.com, you can register with your Microsoft Account or Office 365 Account. You can get and do it for free. Furthermore, you can create your own connector based on Open API standard. We will discuss it in another post in this blog. Before that look the video about how to create your first Flow.
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