A competitive iPaaS product
Updated December 06, 2019
A competitive iPaaS product
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
We use it for data integration or migration stages of the projects we take on as consultants for companies looking to move to Salesforce from some other legacy system. We build out a solution and train a customer's employee to take over the management after we're done.
- The price of the Scribe Online integration platform is very competitive with the features provided.
- The ease of use for designing solutions is good.
- The web-based interface makes it easy to manage from any location without installing operating system specific client-side software.
- Field mapping is not easy to use and is not clear which fields are mapped where or if they're utilized at all
- There are often delays when opening solutions or mappings and waiting 10-30 seconds for the cache to fully load before being able to click on the next item. This can be quite frustrating to navigate.
- The session timeout of 2 hours is kind of aggressive and the login page doesn't play nice with LastPass extension (often have to refresh for it to behave correctly)
- It doesn't seem to support using multiple tabs in parallel
- It would be nice to be able to copy/clone individual elements of a solution rather than only exporting the entire solution. Even better (though might be impossible/challenging to implement) would be to build an element and have it referencable from other solutions so you can edit one and have the changes present in both (rather than just a copy that is independent).
- There is no centrally managed High Water Mark feature: each operation in a solution uses its own independent High Water Mark so it is possible for them to be out of sync of each other if operations take a while to run
- More clients are able to consider an iPaaS solution when it is priced reasonably (compared to Mulesoft, etc.).
- Not having to build a custom code solution that requires an experienced developer and a large amount of time is a benefit.
- We integrated an in-house MS SQL Server database with Salesforce
- We integrated Salesforce with a vendor's PostgreSQL database
3 - The users of the Integration itself are technical resources that can maintain and manage the integrations.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
It is important that the product bring use a proper positive ROI - we need the benefits received by using it to out-way the costs, which can be achieved when it is reasonably priced, the product meets our needs in implementing a valid solution, while requiring a minimal amount of effort to build and maintain.
- We were able to use the High Water Mark feature to isolate and update only relevant data rather then the entire (large) dataset
- Online training
The training seemed basic and didn't really provide instruction or examples for more realistic real-world solutions/projects.
TIBCO Cloud Integration has enabled us to integrate multiple platforms together at a reasonable cost and effort so that we can have a unified system rather than "swivel-chair" isolated systems so that our users can be more effective at the work and our data can be more reliable and accurate.
Our integration has been successful at keeping the data between multiple systems in sync. The most important lessons learned are how to control and manage the data through transformations in Scribe or SQL Server in order to prevent failures due to data type or size mis-match.
TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo) Feature Ratings
Evaluating TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe) and Competitors
Learnings and Advice
We were able to sync down records from related tables in Salesforce to tables in order to find the Salesforce ID of related records by matching against the uploaded External IDs. This ensured that the records exist and limited the need for excessive lookup data calls to Salesforce for each record, by instead joining the main data table to the reference table to find the appropriate ID.
When connecting to a database, create a View with your destination's field names as the aliases so that you can Auto-map/Auto-Link the fields and ensure they're linked to the right destination fields. The View can also do some transformations if you'd rather manage those in SQL rather than in Scribe transformations.
The most helpful thing I learned from the community was how to use the Include tab on Queries to bring over data from other related objects / tables so that you can consolidate some of the work into a single operation.
When you have failures during a load/sync, you can go into the Execution History and Re-Process Selection or Re-Process All of the failures to have them re-try those same records as they were at the time of the load. Any changes you make to the source data in the source system will not be reflected in this Re-Process operation, as it uses the failure records exactly as they were at the time of failure.
Make sure to make time to do a proper and thorough test / trial of the product to full evaluate it's ease of use and capabilities. Don't skimp on judging on first glances and sales presentations.
Using TIBCO Cloud Integration core features
Large list of available connectors, competitive pricing, cloud-based platform
Resetting or manually updating the High Water Mark in order to force more records to sync than it work normally pick up. This was useful in re-running records that failed but have had some values manually updated.
The web-GUI for building the operations is convenient because it doesn't require a large installation of software that might not work properly on all operating systems.
Using TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
2 - Technical resources that build and manage the integrations.
- Sync additional tables or fields
- Integrate a new platform when we migrate to a new system
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe) Implementation
- Third-party professional services
Coastal Cloud
Change management was minimal
- Duplicating / saving existing mappings is a bit of effort
- Testing seemed a bit cumbersome to quickly make changes and observe results
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe) Training
You can understand the majority of the features if you have experience with other iPaaS platforms.
Configuring TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
If you need to write to multiple destination Objects/Tables, try to build operations as a series in sequence when possible, rather than separate mappings.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe) Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Quick Initial Response | Need to explain problems multiple times |
Using TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn | None |
- The reprocessing of failed records is easy to use
- The validation is very effective and useful
- The GUI can be slow to load parts, and clicking on an element too soon can cause it to fail to load properly
- Seeing how far along a process is isn't very easy to do and seems to be slow to update
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe) Reliability
Integrating TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)
- PostgreSQL
- MS SQL Server
The connectors made it easy to use. PostgreSQL did have some issues where Scribe said it was writing successfully but there were no records in PostgreSQL.
- No.
No.
- ETL tools
Database connections are under "ETL" I assume?
Test early and thoroughly
Relationship with TIBCO Software Inc.
I wasn't involved with that
Great support.