General Approach

iMIS SOA web services present a high-level business view of the iMIS infrastructure that is mainly independent of the underlying infrastructure and implementation of iMIS. The view references the next generation of iMIS capabilities and iMIS concepts, yet it works over existing views of the latest release of iMIS today. Many of the concepts, names, and data structures for familiar business entities reflect broad industry standards that at first might not be familiar to long-time iMIS implementers.

iMIS SOA represents iMIS data in terms of advanced models that are similar to patterns that will be included in future versions of core iMIS. Some examples of these patterns follow.

Universal membership groups

All people lists are represented as a standardized membership group concept. The following are all represented uniformly:

Main memberships
Subscription groups
Special interest groups
Chapters
Committees
Communities
Event registration and function groups
Company and family rosters
Media lists
Security
Other participant groups

Universal order entry/commerce

All commerce transactions and history, regardless of type, are represented uniformly, with extensions as needed.

User-defined tables, user-defined activity

These are all represented uniformly.

iMIS SOA introduces new terms for core CRM elements. These names are more standardized in terms of Oasis-Open and other standards. Though these names appear in the underlying implementation, there is no concept that user interfaces need to or should change. Refer to the Glossary for a list of commonly used terms.

Access to data is by way of various web services. Web services become the exclusive mechanism for importing or exporting data to and from iMIS.

iMIS SOA web services utilize iBO and other APIs and access methods to expose data. This ensures data is traveling over well-tested paths. As future versions of iMIS come along with other new underlying APIs, iMIS SOA will incorporate the new API elements, but for the most part, shield existing applications from the change.

iMIS SOA web services is an extensible platform for providing web services for iMIS. Though iMIS SOA web services provides a core set of services, the model is extensible: ASI, partners, and customers can add support for new types of data, queries, and processes at any time.

The following are special built-in entity types:

The special IQA entity that can run IQA queries
All defined BOD (Business Object Designer) entities
All available tables and views