Integrations

Use plugins to easily integrate CogniDox with your other tools

CogniDox uses a plugin and SOAP based API to help bind it with your existing working practices. Below are just a few of the integrations available:

• Word 2007 Add-in
• SugarCRM account management
• Perforce SCM

Microsoft Office Word 2007 Add-in

Word Add-in

A perennial problem in document management is that you create or edit content using a tool such as Microsoft Office Word and then you have to remember to put the results into the document repository.

One way to solve this is to have a handy sidebar available to you when you are using Word that will allow you to:

• Browse the CogniDox repository category structure as a hierarchical tree from a Word 2007 sidebar
• Fast and accurate search on all content within CogniDox (using Lucene/Solr search engine)
• Open files directly into Word for editing, then save back as new draft or new issue
• Create new files from document templates held in CogniDox
• Save new Word documents under a new part number as a draft or issue in CogniDox
• Compare two or more versions of a Word document stored in CogniDox; and highlight changes using Word change tracking and/or review panes

This is done using the CogniDox Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, available in CogniDox 8.1.

The CogniDox Word Add-in is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. It is not available for earlier versions of Word (e.g. Word 2003, Word XP) due to architectural changes made for Office 2007.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM provides the world-leading open-source Sugar™ customer relationship management (CRM) software solution.

As the sales team convert Leads into Contacts at Accounts, one of the final steps is to simply "CogniDox enable" the Account. Once enabled, any Accounts created or edited in Sugar will be updated as CogniDox Licensees. Contacts in Sugar Accounts will be automatically created and updated as CogniDox Contacts. When a contact has been imported into CogniDox from Sugar, their CogniDox extranet login will appear in Sugar.

The benefit and major advantage of this over Sugar alone is that it enables the powerful License Management and content access permissions features of CogniDox to be fully and seamlessly integrated with the CRM features of Sugar.

Perforce SCM

It is common in software projects for product documentation to be included in the source control management system (SCM). While this provides the benefits of strongly controlling the documentation within a familiar SCM system, there are a number of disadvantages that can occur:

• Documentation has a restricted view within the organisation, limited only to those with SCM access
• Collecting comments about documents can be tricky
• The documents are not searchable to the wider organisation
• Distribution of the documents to customers requires a dedicated build process

The CogniDox Perforce integration aims to remove these problems while allowing engineers to benefit from the excellent SCM capabilities Perforce provides. Using the integration, it is possible to associate a document in the Perforce repository with a document in CogniDox. Whenever the document is committed in the repository, a trigger fires that updates the document within CogniDox. The integration brings the following benefits:

• Documents are exposed to a wider audience within the organisation
• Committing a document in Perforce can initiate a review workflow in CogniDox
• Documents become searchable using the in-built CogniDox search system
• Using CogniDox's licensing and publishing features, documents can be quickly distributed to authorised customers

The CogniDox Perforce integration is available as standard from release 8.1.0 of CogniDox, and is suitable for Perforce 2009.1 & 2009.2.