Great simple integration product for small businesses
June 07, 2018
Great simple integration product for small businesses
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Cloud Integration (including Scribe)
Scribe Online is currently being used by one of our divisions for Salesforce replication. We used to use the Integration Services for integration of Salesforce with our Dynamics SL accounting system but we chose to go with other tools for this purpose. For the integration services, we were linking Account to Customers and Vendor data in SL. For replication, we are replicating a subset of our Salesforce objects to support reporting and ad-hoc analysis that involves more than just Salesforce data.
- Scribe Online seems a great product for replication. It manages the metadata challenges. If you don't customize Salesforce this may not be that big a deal to you but if you customize Salesforce like we do then you will appreciate how replication can adapt to the changes. It checks for changes and will automatically update the underlying SQL or whatever provider you use to replicate.
- The documentation is pretty well laid out and the configuration is simple. We established new firewall rules for greater security so we needed to lock down our WAN connections as tight as possible. The documentation was quite thorough on this and we were able to make changes based on documentation alone. All other documentation on a given area seems to explain what is needed.
- The agents used on-premise that work with Scribe Online work well most of the time. The configuration is simple to setup and manage. The documentation as mentioned is clear so easy to quickly implement and get the process rolling.
- We have had communication problems that lead to errors that are hard to troubleshoot. Sometimes the errors are not clear what caused them nor how to clear. The support team has struggled with some of the errors as well. Most of these difficult issues seem to be tied to WAN connectivity. The processes have improved and are more robust than they used to be.
- Some of the Salesforce errors we still do not have an answer for. I am not on Salesforce team and not an architect of that system but some of the errors seem related to metadata and object relations. I have mentioned the errors to Support and they seem to struggle with how to answer sometimes. I have learned to try things in the data to work around problems. But then I have worked with many tools and very comfortable doing this.
- Engineering needs to bulletproof replication and make it easier to clear up issues without hurting the replication process. Mind you one of the best things is this product manages all object changes in Salesforce keeps it in sync with your destination system. But in the past, we have had issues that break the process. Support has been unable to correct a couple times and we had to recreate replication in a new process. We have done massive customization to our Salesforce system so replication has been particularly challenged. If a company does not customize much with custom objects and classes then I would think replication would be very stable. We have not had any issues in over a year so the stability has definitely improved when it comes to this. Perhaps the current product has no issues and our previous problems were only with older versions.
- On the positive side, it is relatively inexpensive. It allowed us to get started quickly as a smaller company and integrate systems that had few options. The replication has worked well. It has burned us with support issues in the past but overall is very cost effective and trusted now. The current product has proven very solid.
- On the negative side, support is lacking on tougher technical issues. Follow up is poor. Some earlier technical issues had no fixes or workarounds. Cloud service based endpoints for calling and receiving was non-existent but seems to be available now. Payload mapping from one source to another is limited.
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SSIS has been around a long time. Very fast and very dependable. Syntax and debugging can be challenging. Connectors are limited unless you buy third party product. Cloud service based API integration is non-existent without third-party connectors. Management tools are non-existent without third-party products. Price is included with SQL Server.
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