As you might remember, at Symphony Innovate 2016, Symphony announced the development of a powerful integration framework and readily available integrations extending the Symphony platform to transform the way we work and collaborate. At the same time, we also announced that all of these integrations as well as the framework would be contributed to the Symphony Software Foundation. As a refresher, here are the integrations that were announced:
Since then, we’ve opened the beta program to all of our existing customers, and worked with them to diligently improve the integrations, and I wanted to provide our community with an update on the open sourcing progress.
We contributed the Symphony integrations to the Foundation repository in December 2016, and they are currently actively developed in the open. Our primary goal since then has been to make the integrations buildable and easy to use for third parties.
What does this mean for you?
As we continue to improve the code base of the integrations, in the next months, you can expect to be able to do the following:
- Run the integrations locally, pointing to a live Symphony instance, e.g. the Foundation's Open Developer Platform
- Modify the existing integrations and customize your own version of the integration to use personally, or deploy to your company
- Modify or expand the existing integrations and contribute it back to the community
- Learn to make a completely new integration with a step-by-step guide to walk you through the process, including sophisticated renderers for your integration
- Submit your new integration to be included in the Symphony market
- Deploy your custom integration to your pod exclusively
In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to share with you the overarching objectives we’d like to achieve by working actively with the open source community:
- All integrations and integration bridges are buildable outside of Symphony internal development
- Transform the entire integration package into a Spring Boot application
- Offer a quick start guide/documentation with skeleton integration/archetype for developers to start building their own
- Support for third-party renderers that have complete parity with what was originally only possible with native Symphony code--as a side note, we are working in alignment with the Financial Objects Standardization Working Group to make it seamless for the community and developers to create rich objects, such as financial objects
- Improvements to the renderers to make it efficient for developers to build them to display data in a way that is unparalleled by any other chat app
- Enhanced documentation/readmes for all code and components to make it very easy for developers to understand what each part does
- Templated configuration pages to make it easy to build the setup page for your app
- Containerization of the integration bridge to make it incredibly easy to get the integrations up and running and deployed
Our goal is to wrap up all of these key items in the next couple months so that the community can interact richly with our platform and work with us in the open to enhance existing integrations, build new integrations and to enable any developer to make a new integration for Symphony easily and effectively. Stay tuned as we will post updates on the new exciting open source integration development opportunities offered by this contribution!
Finally, this being my first time on this blog, I want to take the chance to thank the Symphony Software Foundation for the great support and opportunity to address the community. At Symphony, we value the input and feedback of the community so don’t hesitate to reach out on the dev list, or directly in the Symphony Software Foundation repository and let us know your thoughts!
Vincent Gurle is an associate product manager at Symphony Communication Services LLC. You can learn more about Vincent on his LinkedIn page.
