title: Integrating with 500+ applications
body: <p>Our customers use 500+ applications and we would like to integrate these applications with our. What is the best way to do that? These applications are time registration applications and common for most of them is that they can export to csv or similar, some of them are actually home-brewed excel sheets where time is registered.</p>
  
  <p>The best idea so far is to create our own excel sheet, which can be used to integrate with all these applications. The integrations could be in the form of cells containing something like ='[c:\export.csv]rawdata'!$A$3 Where export.csv is the csv file exported from the time registration applications. Can you see a better way to integrate against all these applications? It should be mentioned that almost all our customers have Microsoft Office.</p>
  
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  <p>Edit: Answers to the excellent questions from Pontus Gagge:</p>
  
  <p><em>How similar are the data in the different applications?</em>
  I assume that since they time registration applications, they will have some similarities, but I assume that some will register the how long time one has worked in total for a whole month, while others will spesify for each day. If Excel is chosen, I believe that many of the differences could be ironed out using basic formulas.</p>
  
  <p><em>What quality is the data?</em>
  The quality of the data can vary so basic validation must be undertaken, a good way is also to make it transparent for the customers, how our application understands their input, so they are responsible.</p>
  
  <p><em>How large amounts of data are you talking about?</em>
  There will be information about the time worked for up to 50 employees.</p>
  
  <p><em>Is the integration one-way only?</em>
  Yes</p>
  
  <p><em>With what frequency should information be transferred?</em>
  Once per month (when they need to pay salaries).</p>
  
  <p><em>How often do the applications themselves change, and how often does your product change?</em>
  If their application is a home-brewed Excel sheet, then I assume it will change once a year (due for example a mistake someone). If it is a standard proper time registration application, then I do not believe they are updated more often than every fifth year or so, as it is a very stabile concept.</p>
  
  <p><em>Should the integration be fully automatic or can your end users trigger a data transfer?</em>
  They can surely trigger data transfer. The users are often dedicated to the process so they can be trained at doing it, which means that they could make up to, say 30, mouse clicks in order to integrate each month.</p>
  
  <p><em>Will the customers have somebody to monitor the integrations?</em>
  As we have many customers, many of them should be able to undertake the integration themselves. We will though be able to assist them over the telephone. We cannot, though undertake the integration ourselves because we would then be responsible for any errors due to user mistakes, etc.</p>
  
  <p><em>Does the phrase 'integration spaghetti' mean anything to you...?</em>
  I am looking for ideas from the best chefs to cook a nice large portion of that. </p>