Businesses use lots of different software to take care of important tasks, such as accounting, file sharing and storage, Customer Relationship Management, or specialized operational apps. Most of the time, the team uses these different software packages independently because each is great at what it does or it is the only way to handle a specialized task.
More and more, software packages are offering varying degrees of features that enable integration. When we say “integration”, keep in mind it is a pretty broad term that can vary from the ability to export data from one package manually to sophisticated capabilities such as accessing the underlying database, getting notifications when something important has occurred, and even programmatically controlling the software like a user themselves might do. Even software without an API can be accessed automatically and made to share data.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we didn’t have a choice. Different software operated in disconnected silos and if you were lucky you could export a bit of data into Excel to manipulate, copy, and maybe re-import it into a different package. Now, particularly with cloud-based apps that do much of their work over the internet, we have a wide range of capabilities that make possible some pretty amazing ways of handling data.
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