Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

MSP Support and Data integration

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
Clear All
new posts

    MSP Support and Data integration

    I'm with a small IT company that's been using CommitCRM for a while, while my boss loves it for how it keeps track of so many forms of data I however find some of the technical stuff lacking. Part of my hiring on was since I'm a heavy sharepoint/web-api based JSON developer he needs info such as connection times from Ncentral by SolarWinds imported to charges or at least create a program capable of taking Excel/CSV export files from SolarWinds and importing them into CommitCRM as charges for the tickets which cannot be done inside CommitCRM (you can import every other kind of information such as accounts and tickets, but cannot do charges).

    My first round attempt to do this consisted of taking the excel spreadsheet export, creating an xml template for the information and processing it via PHP to email to no avail. The correspondence with support ended with a standard apology followed by "Web services / JSON is not a part of the API." "...in case you will be interested to offer the integration plug in that you develop to others (whether for a fee or not) we will need to first formalize it and will then also be happy to assist you promoting it." Ok, so back to the drawing board with nothing but the link back to the wiki I was already studying and the company basically outsourcing their development of plugins to the customer that originally went to them for help.

    Digging further into the forums I've found people requesting these features and the Commit team "taking it under advisement" or "planning to add it in the future" stating user demand dictates what they develop. As SolarWinds is one of the major players in the MSP game and the many requests for Nable/Ncentral support I find Commits lackluster response unacceptable.

    Most recently SolarWinds released Ncentral 11 which includes "Custom PSA Integration" the caveat with this is it requires responses from the PSA in XML format to a port on the Ncentral server but CommitCRM only emails, no way to direct the response to a FQDN/URL:port. Once again I'm limited by functionality. Has anyone had any level of success with CommitCRM/SolarWinds integration? I'm looking for real viable solutions right now, not lip service with a promise to the future that is never going to be fulfilled.

    To summarize:
    1) Import CSV files into charges
    2) XML requests to user designated URL:Ports via email connector (or anything as long as it works)

    Re: MSP Support and Data integration

    Hey John,

    I would suggest leveraging the Web API. While it isn't JSON, it could be made to talk JSON with a proxy webservice. The example (here ) shows VB.NET, but I've used it successfully with PHP as well.

    You won't be able to import charges via CSV. You will need to leverage the API if you want to automate this process. Again, this isn't terribly difficult, and with your experience in web API's it should be pretty straight forward.

    FWIW, CommitCRM's support model is email only, and there is very limited support for the API (understandably). Like it or not, I've found them to be very responsive to reasonable requests, and willing to listen to feature requests - and I've give my share!

    Hopefully that helps,

    Luke

    Comment

    Working...
    X