What to Know About Website Integrations
Do you ever wonder how your integrated systems like your AMS (Association Management System), CMS (Content Management System), LMS (Learning Management System) and other systems can all work together in one website?
Combining multiple tools into a seamless system is called integration. Just like a car can have integrations with a computer, GPS, radio, satellite radio, Wi-Fi, and bluetooth systems, your website can be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps, banks, library storage services and countless other external systems. How is this done?
API’s
Many of the service companies today provide APIs (application programming interface) that enable websites to pull and display data directly from their system. If you are a communications specialist and wrote a fantastic blog article, within your CMS you can either link out to the blog page or have a system integration that automatically detects a new published blog and displays the full content within your company’s website. Another example is a Twitter feed. If there is an interesting thread of tweets regarding a certain topic, an integration can enable it to automatically display on your website through Twitter’s API.
External Authentication Services
Another form of integration is through an external authentication service. You may have signed into a website and had the option to “Log in through Facebook.” When a user logs into your website, it sends them to Facebook to log in. Facebook will return an authentication token, validating that user’s credentials, and logging the user into your website without the user having to enter their credentials twice.
So now you are logged into the website using your Facebook credentials. Within the website is a Journal, Career Center, and Community website. All of these are integrations, and these services all communicate to one another. If a user logs into any of these external services they will automatically log into all. This is called Single Sign On, or SSO. Learn more about SSO in one of our recent blog articles here.
Sitefinity
The CMS Sitefinity comes with built in integrations with SharePoint, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Market, Salesforce, Ucommerce, Lucene Search and others.
There are countless possibilities today for integrations. You need experienced professionals with integration expertise to give your website the added benefit of sharing multiple platforms into one. Vanguard has the tools and experience to integrate your external systems into your website. If you want to learn more about integrations and how it can benefit your users’ experience, reach out to your Vanguard Client Service Manager.