Integration

The Association Management Ecosystem™ is already tightly integrated with SQL Server Reporting Services and Microsoft PerformancePoint (for sophisticated BI and Dashboarding), Microsoft Lync (for modern VOIP integrations), UPS, MailChimp, Amazon SES, and Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net (for payment gateways), Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Access.

Now consider the extensive ecosystem of SharePoint specific 3rd party apps for iPhones, iPads, Windows 8, etc. such as “BoardPacks for SharePoint” by eShare which gives Board Members a collaborative iPad app while also keeping IT folks happy about content living in a secure centralized and controllable location. “Yammer” which makes your environment more social for a very important audience, your staff! There’s even a SharePoint App store, not to mention the thousands of companies selling hundreds of thousands of SharePoint add-on’s.

Including an arsenal of Web Services, API’s and developer SDK’s, it is likely the most extensible solution available anywhere. This can only happen by design, and our solution has been architected from day one with extensibility in mind.

Much of the most common integration takes place without the need for heavy custom development. This fact saves you time and money now, and into the future. It’s just a smarter way of doing things.

Membership Manager may be integrated with virtually any database or web service without writing code.

Keep in mind that unlike many Association Management Software solutions, Membership Manager enjoys the feature rich bloodline of Microsoft SharePoint. As a result, you can use a wizard interface to integrate with external Line of Business (LOB) systems as needed.

Specifically, you can leverage the Microsoft BCS, external content types and external lists (NO CODE REQUIRED).

A core concept of Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is the external content type. Used throughout the functionality and services offered by Business Connectivity Services, external content types are reusable metadata descriptions of connectivity information and data definitions plus the behaviors you want to apply to a certain category of external data.

External content types enable you to manage and reuse the metadata and behaviors of a business entity such as Member or Order from a central location, and enable users to interact with that external data and processes in a more meaningful way.

For example, consider a business entity such as Speaker Abstract. You might want to interact with items of type Speaker Abstract inside a Membership Manager list. Or, you might want to enable the user to pick an abstract from a list of abstracts in a Web Part. You can create an external content type once and then reuse it anywhere you need it.

An external list is a feature in Microsoft SharePoint that enables accessing data from external systems in the same way that SharePoint list data is accessed. External lists use external content types as their data sources. External lists enable you to use the metadata that is already defined about an external content type to create a SharePoint list that has external data that looks and performs like any other Membership Manager list.

External lists enable writing back to the external system if the external system allows it, and if it is modeled accordingly by the external content type. This implies that users can edit external data directly from within Membership Manager. Any changes that were made to the items in the list are synchronized automatically with the external system. By using the Refresh data button in the list, you can synchronize and get updated data from the external system automatically.

Unlike the Membership Manager list whose data is stored in the SharePoint content database (SQL Server), the data in an external list is stored only in the external system. External data is brought into the Membership Manager list at run time when you navigate to the list – meaning it’s always current.