Directly Integrating with Business Systems

The simplest way to directly integrate MTML with a company’s business systems is to interface MTML with the databases that support those systems. Parsing software is available at minimal cost in either Java or Visual Basic that will read XML and produce an in-memory tree of the objects it contains. A simple program can then traverse this tree and use standard ODBC-compliant interfaces to populate business system databases. This process can be used, for example, to create an RFQ in a vendor system and create an initial order in response.

Similarly, a variety of free and low cost software components are available that will read a database and generate XML output. Some database systems even provide native support for generating XML. Since MTML is a dialect of XML, these components can be easily extended to generate MTML instead of a more generic XML dialect. A list of some of these available XML components is available through Member Services.

If your company is using a popular enterprise application or accounting package such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Oracle, Navision, Siebel, Vantive, Great Plains and others, the package is likely to already have support for the exchange of information in XML. In these cases, the integration will be even easier than a database integration. All that will be necessary is to translate between the package’s XML format and MTML. The same parsing software described above can be utilized to read both MTML and the package’s XML files. A simple, literal conversion software component can then be developed to translate between the two formats.

In some cases, procurement systems may be closed, use proprietary databases, and not support a messaging interface. In these cases, it may be necessary to either develop a custom MTML interface with the procurement system vendor, or use screen-scraping techniques to gather the information from appropriate user interfaces and exchange that information using MTML. A list of consulting organizations that can assist with integration efforts is available through Member Services.