August 2007: Integrating Web Services Everywhere
Quote of the Month
"Using a self issued information card, the Personal Government web site can
take a single claim - postal code - and retrieve data across multiple data
stores for a personalized experience... the user builds this public sector
mashup with free web services from StrikeIron. If you actually were a public
sector website, you can imagine how you could extend this with real
data."
-Marc Marcuri: Technical Evangelist for Microsoft
Note from the President
What's New at StrikeIron?
StrikeIron in the News
What's New in Web Services?
Note from the President: Integrating our Web Services everywhere - Salesforce.com as an example
One of the powerful benefits of utilizing standards-based Web services is the practically limitless ways that they can be leveraged. That's the whole idea behind standards in the first place, and when utilizing XML with SOAP and REST-based Web services interfaces, this is especially true for data and related over-the-Web business functionality. Getting live data and functionality to perform to your requirements, rather than the other way around, is the ultimate goal.
One way StrikeIron demonstrates this is by integrating the various Web services we provide into third-party applications. For example, we recently integrated our US Address Verification Web service into Salesforce.com - a leading onDemand CRM application. We used their new APEX integration capabilities to achieve this.
Now, with a simple click of the button from any contact record, the address of the contact can be verified as existing (via reference data from the United States Post Office), corrected if necessary, and also enhanced with additional data. This all occurs directly from within the Leads, Accounts, and Contacts tabs within the Salesforce application. It is available today on Salesforce's AppExchange if you'd like to take it for a test drive: https://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000003gvO1AAI
The important point is the underlying Web service has not changed and as always is available 24-7 via our platform and all of our redundant online infrastructure. In this case, it can now also be leveraged from within an application that somebody is already using on a daily basis, and without a second thought about XML.
Of course this is just the beginning. We and our partners have integrated several of our large catalog of data feeds and business functions accessible over the Web via Web services. This extends the reach and usefulness of these Web services to beyond just developers who know how to incorporate a WSDL endpoint. In addition to being accessible within Salesforce, they are also available as part of developer frameworks such as Zend's PHP framework, Microsoft Excel (via our SOA Express Web services client for Excel), IBM's QEDWiki application, several other IDE's, other CRM applications such as Microsoft CRM and Goldmine, and many more to come. After all, getting live data to you, where ever you happen to be working, is the name of the game. When utilizing real-time data over the Web, we believe you should grow your online IT assets without having to grow your online IT infrastructure.
Bob Brauer
President and CEO, StrikeIron
What's New at StrikeIron?
StrikeIron AppWidget: Address Verification 2.0 is
available for SalesForce.com
Address Verification allows you to
easily perform real-time US-based address verification, and enhancement,
directly from within the Leads, Accounts, and Contacts tabs in Salesforce.
<Address Verification>
Join us at Online Marketing World
Bob Brauer is speaking at Online Marketing World October 3-5 in San Francisco. See his panel on "Integrating Social Networks and Other Disruptive Elements". <Online Marketing>
StrikeIron in the News
BTN: Web Services Functional and Affordable
Financial institutions are turning to Web services to build better
applications. Web services are transforming the process of application
development-and the output of those applications. Using financial Web services,
these institutions are able to easily integrate a large amount of market data
with very simple coding. As a result of delivering accurate and up-to-date
information to employees, clients, and processes, these businesses became
swifter, more responsive, and able to serve their customers better. <Web Services>
StrikeIron Announces Business MashUp Challenge
Winner
Apatar Founder and CEO Renat Khasanshyn winner of the best
mashup using a StrikeIron service <Winner>
Marc Mercuri: Card Space for Personalization - Beyond
eCommerce-Personalization in Public Sector
Personalization is
valuable across industry verticals, and now with information cards, you have the
ability to easily provide personalization on a person’s first visit. Using a
self issued information card, the Personal Government web site can take a single
claim - postal code - and retrieve data across multiple data stores for a
personalized experience. <Card Space>
View the demo that Marc created here
What’s New in Web Services?
StrikeIron IVR Voice Notification 2.0
The
fastest and easiest way to deliver immediate, scalable, and fully-automated
voice campaigns to your applications. Now your organization can deliver quality
on-demand voice applications including alerts, and notifications without
expensive hardware, software or dedicated platform. <Voice
Notification>
Midnight Trader Financial News
The Midnight
Trader Financial News Web Service is a stock screening tool to determine how a
stock is likely to react to commonly occurring news events (i.e., earnings,
analyst upgrades and downgrades, etc.) in the future based on how it has reacted
to similar events in the past. <Midnight
Trader>
StrikeIron Business Data Append
Based on a
company name and address, this Web service appends additional company
information such as the main company contact, industry, number of employees,
branch indicator, stock ticker symbol, SIC code and more. A list of five
possible matches will be returned if more than one Company listing (based on
input) is found. <Business Data
Append>