Understanding Integration Points

This chapter discusses integration points.

Note. The term integration point is synonymous with the term Enterprise Integration Point (EIP) and may appear interchangeably in this documentation.

Overview of Integration Points

Provided by a PeopleSoft application, an integration point is an interface that is used to communicate with other PeopleSoft or external applications. An integration point provides integration details for PeopleSoft applications, including which technologies are involved, technology details, information for using PeopleSoft Integration Broker for messaging, and how different integration points are related.

The integration point consists of data rules for the applications that it supports. The integration points that are delivered with PeopleSoft provide generic functionality so that they can be adapted for use with as many programs as possible.

An integration point can be implemented by using different technologies available in PeopleTools, such as messaging, component interfaces, business interlinks, XML links, and electronic data interchange (EDI).

Integration points can be associated with or used by application groups. An application group is a logical grouping of applications that use an integration point in the same business manner.

Other than this grouping facility, an application group and an application mean the same thing. In the rest of the documentation, the words application group and application are used interchangeably unless clearly specified.

Every integration point is owned by at least one application, but can be used in multiple applications. Therefore, if an application sends an integration point, and another application can receive the same integration point, the two systems should be interoperable, assuming the data structure and the rules of the integration point are implemented the same in both places.

However, sometimes two applications might use the same integration point but implement it in different ways. For example, one application that uses the Customer integration point may need to transform the data before it can be sent to an external system, which has another data structure for its customer information.

An integration point can be a part of multiple application groups. For example, the Department Table integration point may be used by a number of application groups, including PeopleSoft Human Resources, CRM, and General Ledger.

See Interactive Services Repository on the PeopleSoft Customer Connection website.