Integrating Yomly with external applications

In large enterprises, few applications stand alone. There are multiple requirements to share information between applications. In most cases, this is in a single direction, for example, as input to reporting or to transfer transactional information. In other cases, it is bi-directional, where details of a single object are managed across two or more different applications.

Yomly provides you with a large portfolio of integration options, each with their own specific use cases. In many cases, there might be multiple ways to achieve the same objective. Our Professional Services consultants can assist you in identifying the correct type of integration for your requirement.

Choosing the source of truth

When implementing any type of integration, it is critical to identify the application that represents the source of information that is to be considered definitive. The source of truth is the application that you use to resolve conflicts between data sources and from which you recover missing information in applications.

For example, a major discussion we have with clients is whether Active Directory or Yomly should be considered the source of truth for employee information. This is an important question because it determines which one you update to change the other. In this case, we recommend Yomly as the source of truth, as the information we keep is much richer, and the ability of the platform to assign roles and policies is significantly more advanced. Also, the operational characteristics of the platform are based around the concerns of employees.

In the case of an employee taking leave, this information is updated in Yomly, and AD may be instructed to limit access to systems while the person is away. It is much harder to do this the other way as AD does not have any real mechanism for managing leave of the employee.

Therefore, we ask you to choose which end of the pipe you want to consider the source of truth as it will make conceptualizing your integration much easier.

Orchestration

The primary orchestration/automation facility within Yomly is called a pipeline. Pipelines not only enable the automation of the UI, but also provide integration into the various integration facilities via pipeline system actions. 

In addition to integrating with Yomly, a pipeline can access any external REST or GraphQL API and read and write files, which lets you automate a wide variety of integration use cases and enables you to embed them in the UI flow.

This article provides you with information about the following kinds of integrations with Yomly:

• Unidirectional integrations
• Bi-directional integrations
• Microsoft Office integration SDK
• Teams/Slack integration
• Push notification integration

Unidirectional integrations

These are the simplest integrations and in most cases, pass information from Yomly (as the source of truth) to an external application. Often, this is done so the data may be further processed within the context of a different application. An example is the transfer of payroll information to an accounting system.

There are three components to this type of integration; encoding, transport, and consumption.

Encoding represents the way that data is extracted from Yomly, for example, as an Excel spreadsheet. Transport is all about how we get the encoded data to the remote system. Consumption is how you decode and use it within the remote application.

In most cases we do not support the consumption part of the equation. This would require us to have deep knowledge of the target application, and have user credentials of the external platform. Instead, we will get the data to you, in a format that you can consume. What you do with it once it has arrived is up to you as the client.

Encoding

Despite its technical name, encoding is actually a relatively simple operation. The data is selected in some way and formatted according to a template, and finally, the result is written into a file. If this sounds a lot like a report, it is because the two are very similar. In fact, reporting is one of the encoding options we offer.

We offer the following encoding options:

• Yomly BI
• Export templates
• Push API

Yomly BI

Yomly provides a full Business Intelligence offering that allows you to extract information from the platform, format the data, and export it into either CSV, Excel or text format for transfer. This is actually incredibly useful for ad hoc cases, or those part of a manual process. We provide a large number of pre-packaged reports, all of which can be used to create export files for you.

If you have licensed the advanced analytics components, you can create custom reports for these exports. These reports can be automatically scheduled and delivered to you via email. For many use cases, this is sufficient to meet the requirements of encoding and transport.

Export templates

Yomly has its own export file templating engine. This provides support not only for querying and selection of data, but also for layout, conditional formatting, iterations, and validations. It is what we use to provide the WPS and payroll extracts that are used by many organizations.

There are a number of export templates already available in Yomly that can be used as a starting point for building custom exports.

One of the benefits of export templates is that they work seamlessly with Yomly pipelines. This means that the entire process of creating the extract and transportation can easily be embedded in a pipeline workflow, which executes automatically behind the scenes. For example, if after finishing payroll, you want to run six different extracts and transport them to a folder on an SFTP service, you can achieve this by a call to a single pipeline system action.

Push API

Many organizations prefer to use Yomly as the reference source of information about their employees and HR processes. You might require one-way synchronization of data. For example, you might want to:

• Update Active Directory (AD) with new employee information
• Transfer payment information to Oracle GL
• Update Microsoft Outlook with calendar information related to Yomly activities.

To enable these types of transfers, Yomly implements a simple publish/subscribe model, in which events from within Yomly are packaged and sent to a queue. A client program can then read this queue and perform the required tasks on a remote system. Unlike the Yomly REST API and GraphQL APIs, this push mechanism is read-only with respect to Yomly data.

Unidirectional incoming integrations

We offer the following for unidirectional incoming integrations:

• Incoming Queue API
• TimeSheet API

Incoming Queue API

The Incoming Queue API provides a mechanism for updating Yomly data using structured tuples. Essentially, this is a structured object-action-qualifier semantic processor.

For example:

"employee:'Fred', 'update',dateOfBirth=14/01/1960"

It is designed to minimize the size of the queue data and to allow for telemetry streams to produced.

The queue elements are processed in the order in which they are received.

TimeSheet API

Yomly provides you with the Timesheet API to enable you to submit clocking data (clock in and clock out records) from external time-tracking applications to the platform.

Bi-directional integrations

We offer the following option for bi-directional integration:

GraphQL API

In Yomly, REST APIs are deprecated. Access to data is provided through a secured GraphQL API.

As all functions in the platform can be accessed through GraphQL, both read and write, including complex orchestration functions, we can even create alternative UIs for specific requirements. For example, in one case, we have integrated Yomly into Excel.

Microsoft Office integration SDK

We have provided you with sample SDKs for integrating a limited set of Yomly functionality into Microsoft Office VBA applications.

Teams/Slack integration

We have provided you with sample integrations that allow notifications to be passed to Teams or Slack, to extend the capability of your pipelines.

Push notification integration

You can also integrate push notifications, which provides a simple interface to the Yomly mobile and web applications, into your pipelines.