Hoping to spark closer integration with third-party applications, Citrix has exposed a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) for three of its collaborative services, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining.

“Historically, we had not built our products to be open,” said Citrix Vice President Bernardo de Albergaria. “But we’ve seen more and more SaaS service providers wanting to integrate with our products.”

The company has set up a portal where “any developer can register and get access to the APIs,” de Albergaria said. The portal also contains documentation for working with the APIs, and forums where developers can discuss their implementations.

Prior to the establishment of this portal, Citrix did offer a few APIs for GoToMeeting, though only for select corporate customers. The open APIs for GoToWebinar and GoToTraining are new.

Citrix manages about 400 million minutes of audio conferences per month and hosts 125 million sessions with its collaborative products offered through its Online Services division. Exposing some of the APIs for these products will allow other software firms to tie their own products more closely with Citrix’s, potentially reducing the amount of manual record-keeping on the part of their customers.

With GoToWebinar, for instance, an external application can draw attendee data from the application, which then could be used in marketing efforts. A user of GoToTraining can have his or her progress charted by an external learning management system. Synching GoToTraining with another management application would reduce the number of times a user would have to enter basic information into a program.

Some third-party software providers are already using the APIs to fuse their own products with the ones offered by Citrix. Health-care software provider TactusMD is pairing with GoToMeeting with its own software to build a telemedicine application.

GoToMeeting has 10 different APIs exposed through the portal, GoToWebinar has seven APIs, and GoToTraining has 15. More APIs may be added in the future, and, at present, Citrix is not charging for their use. The APIs use the REST (Representational State Transfer) for conveying data, and use OAUTH for authentication.

“Most of the APIs are really around sharing data back and forth,”said Cat Allday, Citrix product line director for GoToTraining. The company does offer an API for creating meetings and webinars, but the user requires an organizer account.

The APIs for GoToTraining, for instance, can provide information such as student attendance, including the time in a session and level of participation.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/243595/citrix_exposes_apis_for_its_collaborative_software.html

Card Scanning Solutions (CSSN Inc.), the leader in image processing and OCR technologies, recently released a Java API for their Magnetic Stripe Reader SDK. This solution is compatible with Java-based and web-based applications, allowing for advanced web based applications to be built and run in popular web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. The Java API further enhances the flexibility of CSSN’s Magnetic Stripe Reader which extracts data from the magnetic stripes of personal ID cards such Driver’s Licenses and Medical Insurance Cards. The data from any AAMVA and ISO compliant driver’s license can also be extracted and is stored into an external file or a powerful database.

With CSSN’s comprehensive Software Developer Kit (SDK), integrators are able to incorporate this reading technology directly into their existing software application. The SDK provides a wider variety of sample programming languages and it is fully compatible with applications written in VC++, .Net, VB6, Delphi, JavaScript, and Java. The Java API can also process RAW data strings from magnetic stripes and bar codes and is able to read and interpret 2D PDF417 and 1-D symbol from driver license barcodes.

“Our goal is to provide our customers with advanced and efficient solutions. In order to achieve this we have extended the capabilities of our existing Magnetic Stripe Reader SDK to now work with Java, a key platform for many developers today.” said Yossi Zekri, President and CEO of Card Scanning Solutions

CSSN solutions have always been highly capable of barcode and magnetic stripe reading but the new Java API pushes these boundaries further and provides a far wider reach, added flexibility and easier integration into environments that use Web and GUI based applications. The Magshell® 900 is capable of reading and processing magnetic stripes and the SnapShell® and ScanShell® units are capable of reading barcode information. This latest SDK release with the Java API makes integration far simpler and supports most popular programming languages.

By integrating CSSN’s advanced technological solutions into a wide variety of software offerings, increasing the efficiency and processing in a vast range of industries such as Medical, Finance, Security, and Automotive is easily achieved.The new Java API now makes the CSSN magnetic stripe reader SDK a true industry innovator and leader.

Additional information on the image processing solutions offered by CSSN, Inc. can be found at www.card-reader.com.

Card Scanning Solutions (CSSN Inc.) is a leading developer of card reading and image processing technologies since 1999. They are renowned for developing an OCR engine and OCR SDK that can read the driver licenses and ID’s from all 50 states and over 40 countries. CSSN Inc.’s software solutions are used among a variety of industries such as Medical, Finance, Security, and Hospitality offering valuable solutions that significantly increase productivity, saves time and money resulting in greater efficiency.

Source:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/29/prweb8917810.DTL