Introduction

ActiveControl has long offered an Integration Framework – enabling integration with ITSM tools such as ServiceNow, JIRA, HPSM and many other products to be delivered for Customers over the years.

During this time, this proprietary Integration Framework – which is based on SAP ABAP – has been expanded as new and existing customers requested integrations with new products, or additional capabilities with existing integrations. This has sometimes required significant Development within Basis Technologies, taking focus from other areas of product evolution.

Due to this situation and indeed also customer feedback – Basis Technologies have introduced a new Node-RED Integration Framework as part of ActiveControl 8.40, which is intended to replace the existing SAP-based Integration Framework over time. Node-RED is an open-source flow-based development tool for visual programming developed originally by IBM for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services. Basis Technologies believe that using Node-RED as an integration middleware between ActiveControl and 3rd Party products will enable new integrations to be setup much more easily and rapidly than we have been able to do in the past.

Ultimately, the aim of the new Node-RED middleware framework is to help our Delivery Team and Customers become much more self-sufficient in setting up new and existing integrations with ActiveControl.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for this document are the technical teams looking to implement integration between ActiveControl and third party tools using Node-Red middleware. The document assumes a reasonable prior knowledge of ActiveControl and indeed standard change and release processes with SAP, and also a willingness to learn Node-RED if it is something that is not already being used within the Customer organisation.