Alacra is often engaged to help clients integrate external information with internal information as part of an intranet or workflow solution. This can be a challenging problem for the client for one or more reasons: internal databases are growing so quickly that they consume the lion’s share of internal development resources; internal databases may be in different formats or difficult to access – there may be “legacy” issues; the solution requires technical resources from one or more departments in an organization. The acceptance and deployment of a wide range of technical standards was supposed to ease this pain, as described in a May 2003 article called Enabling Integration of Internal Data and External Business Information. The article was accompanied by the two diagrams seen here, provided by OneSource.
While a lot of progress has been made in the adoption of the technical standards required to facilitate the integration of external information, it has been slow going. Our view is that this year much more progress will be made and that clients will have more robust and compelling application available to their users as the year progresses. Alacra is working with several clients in this arena by providing access to our concordance services.
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