BMC Remedy Integration - integration

Where can I find a list of BMC Remedy 3rd party integrations? I have found nothing on their website, and their sales department put me in touch with the customer services which wouldn't take my call because I didn't have a customer number.
My company is looking into using BMC Remedy as a customer incident system, and it would be nice if I could integrate it with some software. For example, we could have an internal development tracking system such as Jira, Redmine, MantisBT, Trak, etc. which would integrate with Remedy. Or, have Rememdy itself integrate with something like Hudson or CruiseControl.
So far, I've found nothing that seems to integrate with Remedy -- even with software packages that have a ton of integrations like Hudson and Jira. I don't really care if there are third party proprietary integrations, but I'd like to make sure they already exist and not All you have to do is hire someone at $400 to program everything for you. I want to make sure that there is something now and not be promised it can be done, then find out you really can't do it.

I may be a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to make this info available for anybody who happened to be searching for this answer in the future. BMC Remedy has an API in Java, which uses a native library in C, as well as bindings for Perl and other languages capable of calling native code. If you can integrate with any of those languages, you can write a custom integration program and integrate with that. As 'Gary L' mentioned, Remedy can also expose any form as a web service, which, in my experience, have simple interfaces.
Since the original question was asked, BMC have created a doc with a wealth of information on their Wiki. A Swedish company, RRR, has also collected every version of the Remedy Java API and required native libraries on a single page. It appear that you no longer need a support ID to access these pages and download the API files.
Hopefully somebody finds this helpful!

Your definition of "integrate" is different from their version. Their version of integration means that if a source system exposes its data, then you can configure ARS to retrieve that information and map it to classes (forms) within their system. They have a "generic" integration system that you have to customize. It has three broad areas:
If you can connect directly to a 3rd party database and see its schema, then you can perform
retrievals of that information. We use Oracle today.
They have a java API that allows you access the ARS system for custom code (I do a lot of this).
Flat CSV file importation of data from a source system into ARS (after export).
I looked at their online support for the systems you mention (Jira, Redmine, MantisBT, Trak) and do not see anything that would accomplish any of the three above without your own customizations. With the work that I've done on this system it doesn't surprise me.
I work on a project today that writes custom code doing the items above. It is a system that is configuration/development heavy for us. Your comment: "All you have to do is hire someone at $400 to program everything for you." is not too far off from what we have to do with the system.

There is another option for Remedy integration: Web Services.
BMC Remedy makes it easy to create web services (WSDL). It creates the SOAP and XML for you. When you buy Remedy Incident Management module, it includes out-of-the-box web services that will allow it to consume and/or publish web services which make it easy to integrate with other systems on the intranet or externally. There are BMC publications which provide details on ITSM integration --- but again you will need a customer/support ID to get it from BMC's website.

Yes and no to the Web Services integration. The Version 8 system I was working on had some web services available, and they were incomplete. So I was able to do a number of functions (mostly read-only), specifically for custom display and Change Request checking, and submission of a Change Request and a Work Order. But many functions had no web service, and I ended up brute-forcing through the web user interface (with a customized browser control) to change dates on tasks, or make tasks. Ugly, but effective. There are mid-tier JavaScript calls that can be used, if you know the secret function name and can deal with the dynamic naming convention in play. For Remedy users who are desperate for some integration, there are ways it can be done.

few OOTB integrations are possible with BMC Products but if you want to do it with other you have to write webservices(REST or SOAP)
Companies like IBM or cisco has made connectors for integration with Remedy.

Just adding more detail here:
I also do a ton of direct SQL for remedy integration.
If you're careful and know what you're doing, you can have a stored proc create legal/valid records in a remedy table. (If you do it wrong, the records won't load in the client and in older versions of the windows client can actually crash the client software.)

Related

Training and experimentation system for developing software interfacing with SAP ERP

I am trying to find a good place to start for a potentially SAP related project.
Suppose I wanted to develop stand-alone software that could connect with an SAP ERP (S4/HANA) system and analyze material management and accounting data. What resources would I need to accomplish that? Where could I get an SDK/the proper training for this? How would I get a system to experiment on? I've tried Googling this question but there doesn't seem to be clear authoritative information on this and what I find also seems to be mostly about SAP Business One, which is a different product.
Insights would be much appreciated!
Thank you in advance,
Joshua
You must use REST/OData to connect to ECC and Hana S/4.
Currently, SAP has around 800+ REST APIs for SD/MM/PP/FICO, and almost every quarter, new APIs are added to Hana S/4.
You can check all the available APIs # https://api.sap.com/package/SAPS4HANACloud/all
You can check out the demo below if you want to view an application that provides similar functionalities.
https://demo.inoerp.com:8090
Select Hana SandBox. This is a single app that provides similar functionalities for Oracle, SAP, Dynamics etc.
If you need an API that is not yet published. You can also create your own APIs using ABAP
Regarding technology - You can use anything Java(Springboot/ADF), C# .net, node.js. You will be fine as long as you stay away from the SAP technology stack (i.e., ABAP and UI5 :-))

How can I test my integration with SAP for free?

I need to integrate an API created with .NET with SAP FI/CO.
Researching online I found out there used to be something called IDES that would provide access to an SAP server free of charge, just for testing purposes, but that's no longer available.
The Consolut solution seems to have been a viable solution while it was active:
https://www.outsystems.com/forums/discussion/6598/sap-server-test-account/
Anyway, my question is: Is there any way for an independent developer to test an SAP integration without spending money to access that server? Are there any options out there that would allow me to access an SAP instance for testing purposes?
Here you can find the official list of developer trials that you might access without having any kind of relationship with SAP:
https://www.sap.com/developer/trials-downloads.html.
If you have an SAP S-user, you might have access to more stuff from the SAP Marketplace. From my knowledge, IDES was / is only accessible through the SAP Marketplace (or external sources which use the marketplace themselves).
FI/CO runs on Netweaver AS ABAP (or an older alternative, e.g. R/3), so you could download it here: https://tools.eu1.hana.ondemand.com/#abap. But it will not have FI/CO in it. Based on the discussion here https://archive.sap.com/discussions/thread/2039981 I would say that it is not really possible to get FI/CO up and running on your local Netweaver.
This is a general strategy of SAP. They provide the possibility of trying out their technological platforms (HCP, HANA, NW, etc) but they don't really offer access to their business solutions for free.
If you don't find any other way of getting access to a FI/CO system (e.g. from a third party or customer) then maybe the best thing would be to use the local Netweaver and mock the FI/CO specific RFCs that you are using (assuming that you use NCo for the integration). At least this way, you would know that the integration works at a pure technical level (at some point though, you will need a real system).

What are the different ways to write a widget in SonarQube?

SonarSource has said that they would be dropping support for Ruby on Rails. So assuming that we would need to use Web APIs from here onwards, what are alternate ways of writing your widgets? Has anyone tried any alternate ways of writing one? And how do you link said widget to the UI?
Short answer:
In upcoming versions of SonarQube, widgets and customizable dashboards will be progressively be removed. You will still be able to use the Web APIs to get all the data you want but you won't be able to contribute changes to the "dashboards" of the product.
Long answer:
SonarQube was initially designed to be able to inject and display any kind of information, mostly thanks to the customizable dashboards and widgets (that are indeed written in Ruby). While this helped getting widespread, the downside is that people started using it as a multi-purpose aggregator and reporting tool. One would add information coming from a bug tracker system, another one would add documentation information about projects, ...etc. The consequence is that soon, the global and project dashboards ended up being full of useless and useful information, everything mixed up together in a big mess.
So something had to be done to get back to what SonarQube is meant for: managing source code quality. Every information that can't be precisely linked to a source file should not end in SonarQube. Having said this, it becomes obvious that having a mechanism to define custom dashboards and widgets is just too generic. The web application must provide features that answer precise needs for a precise audience. This is why customizable global and project dashboards are progressively replaced by "hard-coded" pages which answer those use cases. This started with the new project home page introduced in the 5.x series of SonarQube and available in the latest 5.6 LTS. And we'll do the same with global dashboards in the 6.x series.

Is there a working Cocoa MySQL Xcode project?

Or has this been abandoned? I can't seem to find a modern sample project. I haven't been able to make any the old code I find work. I just want to write a simple Mac app that accesses an external MySQL database that's also involved in a PHP website.
The old CocoaMySQL project has been abandoned, but the project has been resurrected as Sequel Pro.
It's open source and you can get the source code here.
If you want a straight library that allows you to access MySQL, you might try the commercial MacSQL framework.
You can also just use the MySQL C API directly, however be careful because if you want to use this in a commercial app the licensing fees are high.
You might find it easier to write some PHP code on the server to deliver the results to your client using JSON or some other lightweight data interchange format. PHP has direct support for JSON and there is a great Cocoa framework that makes it easy to parse and generate JSON code.
This method allows you to completely abstract the database connection from your client, so it is relatively trivial to change the database if necessary in future.
Thanks, Rob, I have actually seen the links to Sequel Pro but I was confused when I got there. Part of my problem is that I am really bad at adding things to an Xcode project. Once I have a project in hand with the correct libraries and whatever all linked up, I can make use of the various methods or functions.
That's why I was asking if someone had a super simple project using MySQL that would hopefully compile for me right out of the box. I can then add all my objects and coding.
Can't seem to find anyone out there willing to hold the hand of us project-challenged. The project settings dialog box and codes that go in various boxes therein are very confusing to me.

MS CRM Development Projects

The shop that I am working part time with is new to Microsoft CRM. I just want to survey what projects have developers done to the system to extend its capabilities.
I can break the work I did into four sections:
Tailoring - Simple field level changes. A lot of this is just making sure the fields and language suited the business I was developing for.
Customisation - More complex changes, generally needing JavaScript and maybe ASP.NET. Some examples would be to use an IFrame and pass values to it from a CRM form. The IFrame would then do interesting things like mapping, charting or give you buttons to do other things. For buttons I would often times use JavaScript to replace the outerHTML in the HTML dom of an IFRAME to show a button rather.
Integration - using .NET to connect MSCRM to other systems. Connected it to Great Plains, Speech Server, SCOM (was called MOM back then), custom LOB systems etc... One interesting one I did was to develop a SSIS component that wrote into MSCRM via the web services.
Reporting - Building reports. In reporting services and in Excel. Excel made for great dashboards because of the dynamic update nature of it.
I have a few (war) stories up at http://www.sadev.co.za/taxonomy/term/7 if you are interested.
I (and others) have implemented a LINQ query provider for the web service layer http://www.codeplex.com/LinqtoCRM.
I did some work with CRM 3.0. My work enhanced the program and turned it into a Document Management app, where you could scan and upload documents based on a case, contact, customer, vendor etc. The .NET SDK back then could have used a bit more work, but I hear with newer versions of CRM it has gotten better. CRM allows for attachments but not at all levels, more at the case level.
We extended 3.0 to send text messages rather than email. There are tools available (for 4.0 at least) to do that now, though.
We also extended it to push service appointments through to Exchange, as due to the workforce being mostly mobile they did not have the CRM client for Outlook.
Two other major areas of development not yet mentioned are plugins and custom workflow assemblies.
Plugins allow you to intercept many of the messages that CRM processes to insert custom logic. The possibilities this gives you are endless because you can intercept all kinds of messages including Create, Update, Delete, and even Read!
Custom workflow assemblies are assemblies that you register with CRM that integrate with CRM's workflow UI. Often times, they perform simple tasks that are useful when modifying form data. Other times, they are more complex like sending status reports.
Custom workflow assemblies are always listed beneath the native options. In the screenshot, everything below "Stop Workflow" was added via a custom workflow assembly.