Chapter 9. Powerful Integration with SaaS Using Logic Apps

	Mix-and-match - verb (used with or without object) To combine in a harmonious or interesting way, as articles of clothing in an ensemble.
	--http://www.dictionary.com/browse/mix-and-match

Software as a Service (SaaS) is taking the world by storm, epitomized by software that runs in your web browser, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Office 365.

As discussed in Chapter 1, An Introduction to Systems Integration in the Cloud, powerful, fully featured business software that is easily accessible via the Internet and requires no underlying investment in IT infrastructure could be viewed by some as the pinnacle of achievement in business software. The big drawcard for firms is that the headache of building and supporting IT infrastructure and maintaining complex software disappears: instead, it is possible to subscribe in a pay as you go model to use the software, and the software vendor manages the underlying platform.

However...

Exploring the Logic App SaaS connectors

Chapter 6, Working with Connectors in Logic Apps, describes in detail what a Logic App connector is. In this section, we delve deeper into the SaaS connectors, highlighting what is common between them, key features and things to know, in order to get a head start using these connectors in your workflows.

The SaaS connectors are fundamentally API apps that have been written and are managed by Microsoft, hosted in Azure. They wrap the SaaS vendor's APIs, providing a consistent interface and user experience that reduces the learning curve required to start using a new API. As new SaaS products come online, it is relatively easy for a developer to pick up the new connector and based on previous experience using other connectors, get to grips quickly with hooking up to the SaaS vendor's API.

It is true that any SaaS provider wanting to extend its reach will have an API, and certainly, it is possible to use the vendor's API directly (using the HTTP connector...

Hooking up to SaaS solutions using the SaaS connectors

Connecting to a SaaS solution is greatly simplified and it is a key feature of the SaaS connectors.

Consider what would be required to connect to a cloud-based solution without an accelerator such as a Logic App SaaS connector. With Dynamics 365 in the cloud, for example, custom code would be required to manage the process of obtaining an OAuth 2.0 token, caching the token for maximum performance, and managing the steps of obtaining a new token when it expires. This is summarized in the following sequence diagram:

An alternative option to writing custom code to support the interactions mentioned earlier is to let Microsoft do the heavy lifting and manage this process instead.

Office 365 follows the same approach, and once authenticated with both, it is possible to start building a solution that allows Sunny Electricals to create a process that ties together these two popular Microsoft SaaS solutions. This will form the basis for our first...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the capabilities of Logic Apps and how they can be applied to typical SaaS application scenarios.

SaaS applications provide many benefits over more traditional custom-built commercial off-the-shelf products, including pay as you price options, and evergreen software updates.

Given these benefits, it is important to ensure that our working practices and processes can be automated and delivered in a scalable way.

Logic Apps provide connectivity to many SaaS applications. We have shown how we can connect together Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Salesforce, all of which have a key role to play in major enterprises, to build processes that reduce the effort and workload required to achieve typical tasks in an organization.

We further discussed hybrid scenarios that allow an organization to build on key line of business software assets and make use of the new paradigm of SaaS solutions.

In this way, Logic Apps are an excellent complement to an organization's SaaS...