eConnect: To buy or not to buy?

[Vergence]

Hello all,
Here is my situation. We have an IBM AS400 system which contains mainly COBOL applications from years back. Many of our essential systems run on the AS400 and we are destined to be using it for the foreseeable future.
We recently purchased Great Plains (7.5) and I've been doing a lot of integrations from AS400 to GP through Integration Manager. The main problem I have with Integration Manager is that is pretty much is a one-way street: Into Great Plains. As it stands now my company is going to be pushing both ways. In short, I need a way to sync our data both ways and I'd like avoid it being a manual process. I was looking at eConnect because it appears that this is what it does, but I've gotten a little confused on the details.
Questions:
1). Does eConnect run both ways?
a) Some documentation on it claims:
eConnect supports integration BETWEEN data from other applications and your Microsoft Great Plains application, enabling high volume and high speed in back-office transactions. Data can be pushed INTO Microsoft Great Plains from diverse application types such as Web storefronts, Web services, LEGACY APPLICATIONS, customer relationship management applications, and point-of-sale applications.
b) From the document it appears to only run one-way (no better than Integration Manager).

2). Is this (in general) how the application works?
a) You have Table.A on AS400 legacy system and Table.B on Great Plains.
b) It monitors each database it is instructed to for changes. When something changes in Table.A it writes a record of that in XML and then, using specifications, makes changes in Table.B

3). BizTalk is almost always mentioned in the same sentence as eConnect in most of the documentation I've read.
a) Is BizTalk an add-on to eConnect?
b) Do I need BizTalk to have eConnect 'talk back' to the As400?

As you can see I'm not exactly an expert on SQL or Great Plains, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to use eConnect to 'link' tables in Great Plains to my As400 system (which, of course stores information in wildly different formats from Great Plains). Thank you in advance for your input.

Ivan

 

[ABerkowicz]

Hi -

We own eConnect and are getting ready to look at it and use it. Let me tell you a little of what I know and have found out.

eConnect does run both ways - inserts data into GP and extracts data out of GP. The extracting out is called "Requester" and there is no additional cost.

In essence what eConnect does is that is creates a bunch of stored procedures in SQL - encrypted procs that contain all the business logic for inserting data into the tables of GP. This is the best benefit of eConnect, in that it validates data before it is written to GP database.

You can add custom business rules that sit above or below each of the stored procedures to add your own business logic.

It works with XML documents - you have your application generate an XML well formed doc and then use eConnect to integrate.

Looks pretty cool so far - I am not well versed in biz talk or messaging or AS400 - I have none installed - instead I use VB and am able to call the dll directly instead of making it a service so far in my testing...so in my case I dont need biz talk -

I hope this helps a bit - if you have any other questions, let me know and I will try to help since I am experimenting with it.

Angela

 

[Vergence]

That is helpful Angela thank you.

If it helps anyone to assess my situation: I use ODBC to go to the AS400 so connectivity shouldn't be a problem. What I'm really worried about is that I won't be able to set up a 'relationship' between two tables (one in GP and one in AS400) and step out of the loop and let them continually update each other. Is there a lot of manual process or can this thing just run all the time on it's own once you get your relationships set up?

Thanks again,

Ivan

 

[Vergence]

I hate to BUMP my own post but I'd really like to know if anyone else has experience with eConnect and what you can do with it. I've read pretty much all the documentation I can find on it and I still can't determine if it can do real-time integration between two systems without customizing my non-GP source.
In integration manager I need a specifically configured source to integrate and I need to be involved to run the integration in batch form. I'm trying to determine if eConnect can use sources that are configured in different ways and be given parameters to interpret them. Then I want to know if eConnect can take this data and integrate it real-time with Great Plains (and from GP to my source).

Thanks again for all your help,

Ivan

 

[celeron895]

How about asking the people that sell the product? They might be able to answer some of these questions.

 

[Dukester0122]

I'm installing eConnect today then would test it with Made-to-Manage which our sister company is using. Since we're only using the trial version it only works with TWO Inc. not our real company. I'm still waiting for our VAR to send us the quote.

I'll give me feedback later.

 

[klewis10367]

As an FYI you can schedule Integration Manager to run by using autodim, which Great Plains should provide you free of charge.