Towards an Out-Of-The-Box Integrated Services Environment

Although today a well-known Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System such as SAP can support many of the standard organization needs, the fact is that for many reasons most organizations prefer to change the ERP default configuration and/or complement the ERP with many other external applications, either existing or new ones. However, these external applications are still expensive to develop but especially to integrate with the ERP and even more expensive to change in order to support new business processes. In this paper we present an integration tool that we developed for the OutSystems platform called Integration Studio. This tool completely automates the task of integrating OutSystems applications with .Net assemblies and relational databases. In addition, the tool was designed with an extensibility philosophy and was already extended to support easy integrations with SAP and Java. Other technologies, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), will follow soon. With Integration Studio, the OutSystems platform now supports not only the fast and easy creation and change of applications but also the easy integration of them with any other existing application in the organization. Furthermore, other non-OutSystems applications can also access the OutSystems platform (e.g. using Web Services) to easily integrate with any OutSystems or non- OutSystems applications. With Integration Studio, the OutSystems platform is now a fully automated Integrated Services Environment (ISE) that, unlike the existing products in the market, is extremely easy to learn and use.