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Teamware Office is based on open industry standards and the idea of giving customers the opportunity to build a software system that can meet their special needs — matching their existing computer environment and growing with their future requirements. In addition to the internal integration between Teamware Office applications, Teamware Office has been designed to promote easy enhancement with various tools for integration, and to allow customers to tailor their IT environment according to their business processes.
This article gives an overview of the different client and server-side integration possibilities.
Teamware Office Integration Kit provides direct functional cooperation between groupware services and standard third party applications, allowing the user to easily move data between groupware services and productivity tools. The Integration Kit adds Teamware commands to the menus of the applications or uses the application commands through the Simple MAPI. The user can select and run Teamware functions, such as mailing a document, or saving a document in Library, directly from the applications.
Teamware Mail client provides the Teamware Plug-in Interface, which enables integration with configurable commands. A configurable command can be mapped to communicate with a 3rd party software and perform a requested action such as saving an e-mail message to an external case or document management system. Integration will require some project work to develop a Teamware Link application that intermediates between the Teamware Mail Plug-in Interface and the 3rd party application.
Figure 1. An example dialog displays the contents of a selected message. The Plug-in button on the toolbar is highlighted with a red circle.
Teamware Link provides an easy-to-use, high-level application programming interface to Teamware Office services. It enables application programmers to embed groupware functionality into their tailored business applications. It also allows the customization of the Teamware Office environment by creating utility and add-on applications accessing the Teamware information. Teamware Link supports all information sharing, document management and teamwork automation features of the Teamware environment.
Teamware Office comes with an XML interface that can be used for application development and integration. XML-formed requests that are processed by Teamware Office Advanced WebService can be used to access Teamware Office data. Doing this enables development of applications without depending on a certain language and integration with existing business applications.
Teamware Office XML Toolkit for developers and integrators covers about 50 XML functions. The Toolkit consists of SDK documentation, a sample application and source code samples.
Teamware Office includes a number of ready-made, JSR168 compliant portlets for integration with portal systems. The default portlets include among others a list of mail message, a list of calendar appointments, a list of new incoming items and a menu portlet.
Teamware Office includes a RFC2476 Message Submission Agent (MSA), which can introduce messages into the Teamware Office system on behalf of a user. The MSA allows that mail to be delivered using the Teamware Office delivery mechanisms. This then allows message statuses, such as delivery reports, receipt notifications and replies, to be handled in the normal Teamware Office way. Copies of sent items are visible in the Teamware Mail outbox.
Message Submission Agent offers a user-friendly solution to sending messages from mobile phones via Teamware Mobile. Message Submission Agent also acts as a general submission agent for any POP or IMAP client that users SMTP to submit mail.
Integration between Teamware Office and an external directory (such as Microsoft Active Directory or SUN Identity Manager) offers synchronization of basic user information (name, phone numbers, addresses, etc.) between the contents of other directory and Teamware Office Directory. Organizational unit (OU) and group information can also be mapped and synchronized. In addition, Teamware Office can be configured to use an external LDAP-based directory for user authentication.
Also a number of connectors can be used to connect Teamware Office with 3rd party systems. An example is the Teamware Connector for Mail Archive.
Teamware Mobile integrates with Teamware Office and offers mobile-phone access to Teamware Office Mail, Calendar and Address Book.
In addition to the above mentioned already available integration capabilities, a new API will be introduced to Teamware Office in the version to be released in the spring 2008. This is an event-based API that will allow 3rd party software to register to receive Teamware Office Calendar events making synchronization of data more efficient and less performance consuming.
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