ASC Blog

Lessons Learned Case Study – Fault Tolerant Integration and Syncing

Posted: March 9, 2016
Written by Angie Stockley

A recent third-party partner incident highlighted the strength (ISO-certified quality procedures) and flexibility of ASC’s fault tolerant integration and syncing practices. ASC is sharing the incident below to illustrate our best practice capability and our lessons learned quality focus.

Salesforce has a planned disablement of TLS 1.0 beginning in June 2016 and as part of the planned exercise is allowing selected clients to enable an optional higher security transport layer update ahead of the main June 2016 disablement schedule. One of our customers accepted the advance update which subsequently suspended the ASC-Salesforce API data sync feature for the customer instance (seems the API was configured to the TLS 1.0 parameters and ASC was inadvertently not engaged to update the related integration connectors in line with the client’s planned update).

Due to the fault tolerant design of the ASC data sync no data was lost and recovery was seamless and easy. The sync was suspended for just this customer, data queued and subsequently processed once ASC certified the update corrected the TLS issue (all within a business day).

Despite the best planning and intentions, these things do and will happen (e.g., someone unknowingly breaks a connection). It simply reinforces the need for fault tolerant integration and syncing practices and proper guards against data loss.

As part of our ISO-certified quality management procedures, ASC has a complete roadmap of corrective actions with Salesforce (and other platforms) for various potential scenarios. And in this case, ASC took such corrective action right away resulting in fast and complete resolution of the issue.

ASC is architected with an external system queue that immediately detected the sync and push failures and automatically alerted the ASC support team for action. Support simply paused the sync queue to this customer while proceeding to assess the cause of the failure. Working in partnership with the customer, the root of the issue was quickly discovered and subsequently fixed by the client (they deactivated the optional update). ASC in parallel recovered all the queued records and activated the queue once again with no pushed updates lost for the client's Salesforce data. ASC will work in partnership with the client before they implement the update again.

For additional information, please contact us.

Seamless Integration Whatever Your SFA, CRM and ERP Solution

Whether you need contract lifecycle management (CLM), document management, forms management, pricing and quoting management or all the above, ASC solutions seamlessly integrate with all major Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions as well as any Sales Force Automation (SFA) components. That means, with ASC solutions, all your systems -- such as Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Peoplesoft -- are efficiently and quickly connected for optimal business efficiency, visibility, cost savings, risk and revenue management. Find out more about ASC's overall system integration capabilities.

Flexible eSignature Integration

In addition to SFAs, CRMs and ERPs, the ASC solution can flexibly integrate with virtually any system you use, including eSignature engines. The ASC platform enables customers to use ASC’s own basic eSignature functionality to inject signatures without incurring eSignature vendor costs or it can easily and seamlessly integrate with and accept eSigned images from third party eSignature engines such as Adobe, EchoSign, DocuSign, AlphaTrust, etc.   And, whatever option you select, ASC Contracts goes one step further to automate the workflow and apply business rules surrounding the eSignature process. Find out how you can use your preferred eSignature vendor.

Open Standards Architecture and Web Services API

ASC's unique open standards architecture, web services API model, flexible development languages, out-of-the-box middleware connectors as well as our agile development processes and trusted technology enable ASC solutions to rapidly and seamlessly integrate with most enterprise level IT infrastructure, including on-premise applications, third-party solutions, external cloud services as well as legacy systems or proprietary (home grown) software.  ASC solutions also easily enable native adaptors or connectors, mashups, composites, data integration and whatever integration model best suits your system needs.

For build it yourself integrations, the ASC open standards architecture and web services API model supports virtually all major development tools and environments  (e.g., .NET, Java, PHP, HTML,  XML, SOAP and more). The open architecture of ASC Contracts also accommodates the substitution of components such as Light Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

This integration flexibility ensures a viable, cross-organization ready contract management or business process solution that quickly saves you time and money.

Get ASC Working for You!

Ready to automate and streamline your enterprise contract management and business process management practices? Contact us to find out how.

ASC's enterprise contract management lifecycle software, document management, form management and pricing and quoting solutions help you reduce costs, improve productivity and profitability, and increase business intelligence.