Dataports, what are they and how to use them in SyncForce?

The Dataports data exchange technology was developed as a joint venture between Cap Gemini and SyncForce and you can read more about the ideas behind it in this Dataport Introduction presentation.

The rest of this article will focus on how to use Dataports within SyncForce to distribute your product data and digital assets.

Dataport set-up

Before you can use Dataports in SyncForce, for each data receiver a Dataport needs to be configured by your SyncForce implementation partner. This is fairly straightforward and all your partner needs to know is who the owner of the receiving dataport is and optionally an additional reference.

The data receiver should implement one of the available client packages for DotNet or Java in order to receive the data packages. The packages can be downloaded from GitHub. With the actual data transfer handled this only leaves the data processing at the receiving end to be set-up.

Dataport usage in SyncForce

In the Manage Product Portfolio module you can activate configured Dataports on each (Finished Good) product in the Data distribution tab of a specific product.

Once a dataport has been added to a product and as long as it stays active, each time the product data is released in SyncForce a message will be generated with the latest product data and digital assets listed in it. This message will be stored on the Dataports server until the data receiver picks it up and processes it.

Above an example of a dataport that has been added to a product. The DataPort address is the unique GUID that each dataport has and is the identifier with which the receiver can collect the updates that are meant for them. You can see in the Subscribed on column when the dataport was activated and each time the product information is released the Latest data exchange date will be updated.

With the red trash can you can stop the dataport subscription for this specific dataport-product combination.