It’s a perennial problem: your accounting department owns great software they utilize at a high level, as do your estimating, pre-construction, and PM teams. Yet, inevitably, each software product barely interacts with the others, if at all. This conundrum typically forces users to resort to one or more of the following:
- Sub-par ‘integrations’ that rarely perform as promised
- A ‘walled garden’ of software products that are all produced by the same company. They often barely integrate with each other, but you’re limited to the feature-set that company chooses to provide you.
- Double-, triple-, or even quadruple-entry.
So, what’s a construction manager to do? For your most important inter-application links, you could have a custom data sync tool built by a software firm. (Cassell Consulting has built several of these interfaces in the past.) However, our next major endeavor will be less focused on application-to-application connectors, and more on a unified hub, to which all major construction applications can ultimately be connected: for instance, one using Procore’s newly-released public API.
What’s an API?
The acronym, API, stands for Application Programming Interface. In simplest terms, an API is a set of tools and rules that a software architect can make available to other programmers who want to interface with her product. Ever used Facebook or Google to log in to another website? That website’s API is ‘talking’ to Facebook/Google’s API when you do this. Basically, any time one or more web apps or desktop applications are communicating with each other, there’s almost certainly at least one API at work behind the scenes.
So, what’s the plan?
Cassell Consulting is partnering with Procore in developing their public API, which is currently in a state of near-completion. One current task, is the .NET version of Procore’s API: this is essentially a large array of ‘wrappers’ for the API functions, which will allow Procore to interface with any Windows desktop application. Having laid this groundwork, we’ll move on to the individual connectors that allow Procore to interface with the most popular software products its users own. Sage Estimating (Timberline) to Procore, Viewpoint to Procore, and ProEst to Procore are our first three tasks. Please send us an email if you’d like to join the beta test team of the Sage Estimating to Procore Import.
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Future integration projects will likely be dictated by our users and clients. (Need one? Email us!) Theoretically, just about any program could be linked to Procore, so we’ll weigh demand, feasibility, and functionality when assessing software candidates for this project. Ultimately, we’re thrilled to be partnering with Procore, and our development team is excited by the programming scope and depth this API makes possible.
By Andy Helmsworth[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
