Anyone using multiple integration engines?

So far I’m aware of BizTalk and Iguana being used here in addition to Cloverleaf.

TIBCO has been discussed from time to time but did not seem to offer anything we didn’t already have and likewise with NeoTools and whatever Dave Shaffer is calling his prodcut nowdays (I’m thinking it is now called CorePoint).

We continue to come back to the idea much of what competes with Cloverleaf might do the same thing so why would we buy something we already have.

If Cloverleaf was hard for us to use or not robust then looking for another product might make sense but it has done a good job for us.

It is the other people outside the integration team that seem to bring this up for discussion.

BizTalk was shoved down our throats dispite our warnings and finally was reduced in scope usage because it is designed to be used more for web services.

Stay away from BizTalk especially for HL7 persistant real-time interfaces.

Iguana has been here as a bridge gap, which is to give application owners a way to create a HL7 sender/listener that can communicate with cloverleaf and their database.

If you try Iguana, insist on getting a more current version that is cluster aware.

The older version of Iguana isn’t cluster aware and whenever one interface craps out when a database moves to another cluster it hangs all the Iguana interfaces that are grouped together in a dashboard instance which is like a cloverleaf site.

The newer cluster aware version isn’t suppose to do that but time will tell.

Iguana does NOT queue messages and handles a single message to completion before accepting ownership of the next message, so when it hangs and has to be rebooted there is no message recovery issues because they will be queued on Cloverleaf or the foreign system interface sender.

Not an especially likeable design but good since the cluster aware problem is much too frequent with such a wide spread impact in the older version that most of our interfaces are running on.

We have used Iguana to augment Cloverleaf for doing ODBC interfaces before we got the ODBC module for Cloverleaf.

The original motivation for Iguana was to give application owners a way to create a HL7 sender/listener when they wouldn’t have that capability otherwise.

If this is deemed not appropriate for discusion in clovertech, the clovertech admin can delete this without concern to hurting my feeling since it does talk about potentially competing products.

Greetings,

We are currently using a Windows based product known as GlobalScape to handle our secure transfers that involve SSH (SFTP), PGP encryption,

and a myriad of other secure/non-secure file transfers.  This filled a gap as Cloverleaf did not have the full functionality to handle this family of secure transfers.

However, with CIS5.8, the SSH protocol is now available and of course there is the Tcl Curl with its SSL functionality.

Also: BizTalk is used by our finance department to handle financially based file transfers via our GlobalScape engine but it is not anywhere near the capabilities of Cloverleaf and definitely NOT designed to maintain persistent connections.   It too is Windows based.

There may be other engines running about in our organization however our group does NOT support them hence my curiosity and energy levels are devoted to Cloverleaf and the GlobalScape engines for now.

Thank God I don’t support BizTalk!!!

Hope this helps you out.

Enjoy.

We recently implemented ConnectR for integration of Allscripts, used by our physician clinics.  We did not implement it by choice, I would like to emphasize.  It was simply required in order to build interfaces to Allscripts.  We don’t like ConnectR nearly as much as we like Cloverleaf.  Its amazing how many things you find wrong with Cloverleaf until you use someone else’s engine and realize Cloverleaf is totally awesome.  🙂

I guess our short answer is ‘no’ because the intent was not to ‘enhance’ Cloverleaf — but we do have other data exchange/integration products.

We use Cerner Millennium as our clinical information system and EMR and whether you’re licensed to develop interfaces on their OpenEngine product or not, you’re required to have it installed as the basic connection point in/out of Cerner — a lot of healthcare products are like that…  With OpenEngine though, it’s fully functional, by omission or commission, and non-licensed users get keys to the entire smokehouse although we’re only supposed to do basic connection configuration and some code mapping.  As an integration product, it’s an amalgamation of front-end GUI’s and back-end text-based tools that I find confusing compared to Cloverleaf’s integrated enviroment.

Although it’s not an engine, we also have AutoMate, which we basically use as an enterprise secure FTP server, but has it has a ton of data exchange functionality.  I don’t think it can be used at the transactional-level, but I have not explored it in depth.  Definitely has taken a lot of file-level exchange off my plate as it’s all GUI-driven and can be set up by non-developers with a lot of nice bells and whistles thrown in.