Third Party Vendor Integration Development Environments

Author: Eric Vasbinder

Overview

Trimble Viewpoint's Trimble Construction One and Viewpoint One solutions provide a powerful way to experience our solutions, including our industry-leading ERPs. When our products are located in our cloud, customers enjoy the premiere way to experience our solutions. However, with only a few exceptions, our cloud solutions are not designed to provide hosting for third party products. Thus, to adhere to security and compliance requirements, we do not routinely host third-party software in our cloud. This restriction is doubly true for any third-party vendor who is developing integration solutions for our products, including Vista, Spectrum, and more. As such, software vendors who would like to develop integrations to our products must use their own infrastructure to host and develop their software code, but can remotely connect to a Vista, Spectrum, or ProContractor installation in our cloud.

Deployment Model

For third-party software developers, the deployment model for their development environments may be separated into two buckets:

• Those items that are located in the Trimble Viewpoint cloud.

• Those items that must be located externally to the Trimble Viewpoint cloud.

Located in Trimble Viewpoint's Cloud

The following items may be located within a Viewpoint cloud-hosted development environment for third-party software developers:

• Viewpoint ERP solution (e.g. Vista, Spectrum, or ProContractor)

  • Most Trimble Viewpoint software vendor partner contracts will provide access to an ERP development environment, located in Viewpoint's cloud.

• Additional Trimble Viewpoint products.

  • These may include HFF, Field Service, and more.

• Custom Stored Procedures, triggers, views that are housed in a viewpoint products database.

• SSIS packages hosted alongside the Viewpoint product.

Located Externally Outside of Trimble Viewpoint's Cloud

Please note that since the following components may not be hosted within Viewpoint's cloud environments, any third party software developer must find another location within which to place these tools. Possible options include on premise hosting or hosting within the software vendor's own cloud environment. Ideally, the software vendor's environment should be hosted in the same Azure data center region as their Viewpoint development environment.

• Any third-party development libraries such as node.js

• Any third-party development tools such as Crystal Reports Builder, Eclipse, and Visual Studio.

• Any compiled third party code.

• Any third party source code, other than the SSIS packages and stored procedures mentioned above.

Connection Method

Given the above, we know that the third-party software vendor's own development environment will be located externally to the Viewpoint environment where in the Viewpoint products are hosted. Since the networks of the two environments are completely separate, an appropriate connection must be made between the two locations.

Two options for remote conductivity include:

• IPSEC VPN

• TLS Database Endpoint

tl;dr: Our cloud environments are NOT meant for third parties to develop or host their integrations within. They can be used to host a Vista or Spectrum or PC test environment, but the third-party components may not be developed or hosted within our cloud. Specifically, our cloud environments do not allow for third parties, including software vendors developing integrations to our products to have "root level" or Admin access to the server operating system itself, to install unsupported development tools, or to install or develop their own programmatic bits. All third-party programmatic bits must be hosted externally, outside of the Viewpoint environments where the Trimble Viewpoint products will be located. A remote connection, either an IPSEC VPN tunnel or the TLS Database Endpoint, will be set up to bridge the gap between the two environments.