Sage 100

A customer reached out to us with a request to find a way to give their customers a way to see tracking information though their website.  The idea/suggestion was their customer goes to the website and enters their PO # and Zip Code (in case of duplicate PO #s) and then the tracking number for shipped invoices will show up on the screen.  

Has anyone done something like this before that would have any suggestions on how this could be done?  We have a call scheduled with their web guy on May 1 to get more information about how he would get the data out of Sage real-time and show it on a website.  Could this be done through an ODBC connection or does it have to happen some other way?

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Chris Love
Accounting Systems, Inc. (ASI)
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The best way to do this is using two APIs.  There is an API for the web store and an API Sage 100.  The web store API requests the tracking number from Sage 100 via a JSON file, and Sage responds to the request with a JSON file containing the results, that then get presented to the user.  We have done a lot of this work.

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Doug Higgs
Midwest Commerce Solutions, Inc
(312) 315-0960
Chauffeur, Chef, and Personal Assistant to Sprinkles
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We typically prefer a push, like a scripted copy (merge) of the applicable data to a separate SQL server, which is then queried by the web functionality.  That way there is no connection from the web service directly to the Sage server / data.

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Kevin Moyes
Technical Systems Analyst
Munjal White Consulting Co.
Toronto ON
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Before you get too deep into a one-off project, I suggest you fully explore whether the customer might eventually want more of a customer portal. At least if you run down a list of questions about what functionality they'd like, they can still decline, and when they come back in a year asking to expand the usage, you won't feel guilty ( or be guilted by them) that you didn't offer a full portal-type solution.

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Wayne Schulz
wayne@s-consult.com
Schulz Consulting
(860) 516-8990
Moodus, CT
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