The Marketplace is a component of the Professional Developer Partnership™, a new initiative from Laserfiche to make integrations more approachable for our customers. Our customers understand the value of integrating Laserfiche with the other applications they use regularly. They’re often reluctant, however, to move forward because of the difficulties associated with custom integrations. Cost overruns and even outright failure are not uncommon when attempting to create an ad hoc integration.

With the PDP, we’re inviting vendors of other software applications as well as independent integrators to create integrations with Laserfiche that customers can have demonstrated for them before they buy. This makes the integration much more out-of-the-box, and provides a much higher comfort level for the customer. As Laserfiche CEO Nien-Ling Wacker mentioned in her keynote speech at January’s user conference, we want the PDP to help turn the idea of integration from a monster to a teddy bear.

The Marketplace builds the Laserfiche community by expanding its knowledge base and publicizing innovative customizations and integrations. It’s where PDP members post the integrations and customizations with Laserfiche that they’ve created. It’s where users can share successful innovations for template fields, Quick Fields sessions, folder structures or other helpful configurations. Customers can take advantage of it to learn how better to set up their systems. They can also find out what integrations are available, read more about what each integration does and learn how to take the next step towards actually acquiring integrations they’re interested in. Customers can also request integrations they don’t see. It’s pretty easy for a software vendor to make a business case for an integration with Laserfiche if several of our customers have requested it. As we move forward, we’re also going to give customers the ability to post comments and rate offerings on the marketplace.

By giving our customers more options to run smarter, we strengthen the user community and offer more opportunities for innovation. Integration with Laserfiche can save a lot of time and money, so the more integrations that are available, the more opportunities our customers have to bring useful functionality to their organization. Sharing the success of particular configurations and strategies creates opportunities for other users to streamline their work processes and get the most from their installations.

Tags: integration

Posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.