The Power and Benefits of integration Performance A four-part series on redundancy, security, and performance In part 3 of this series, we discussed the importance of redundancy and how it can act as a safety net in moments of disaster. In the final post of this series, we'll talk about performance best practices. High-Performing integration Having great integration performance can create more consistency, increased efficiency, and further reliability for your integration. This means business scalability, improving overall customer experience and making your business easier to manage. In order to increase your ecommerce system's performance, data should be scoped down into small packet-sized sets, reducing the amount of data to the bare minimum. However, customers may still need access to data beyond the scoped data. For example, if a customer were to go to your site and view products, then availability of the product will not be known until checkout. If inventory data has not been stored, you must manually check inventory every time someone goes on your site. This is clearly a very inefficient process. The solution to this problem is to cache your data, eliminating the need for redownloading or ping. Caching Defined A cache is a location for temporarily storing information. Files that are automatically requested when on a web application are stored on a hard disk in a subdirectory for a browser. Web content and other sorts of information on the Internet are distributed to multiple servers that are periodically refreshed. The time period for refreshing varies; it could be every one minute or five minutes. This ensures the most updated information is available. Since not all data will be needed at all times, information that is not required at that moment can be stored in a cache so that it is readily available when requested. In addition, enabling caching can significantly reduce bandwidth and web hosting. With caching, your integration will perform better, and you and your customers will be able to acquire real-time data. eConnect and MS Dynamics GP integration When it comes to real-time data, Microsoft eConnect is another important component. Using Microsoft eConnect during the integration process is highly recommended. eConnect acts as an intermediate platform, streamlining all data and ensuring that every aspect of the web application works together to maintain consistency throughout the entire platform. Another reason to use eConnect is that it facilitates the upgrade process. Without eConnect, you integration must be changed to match the latest version of Dynamics GP every time you upgrade, which can be troublesome and time consuming. Microsoft eConnect allows you to upgrade Dynamics GP without changing your integration. Clarity Can Help If you would like to learn about how you can apply best practices when completing your integration, contact us today for a free consultation. We have top-notch experts ready to help you with your business needs.