Uniface Social Media Integration

Uniface systems are traditionally large systems used by bigger companies for their internal administrative processes. And Social Media is all about sharing information and experiences on the Web. So where is the connection?

The connection is in Social Media Marketing. This is a very broad concept and the word Marketing is a bit misleading. It is about getting in touch with your customers, communicating with them, improving the customer experience and your brand identity. And in the process your sales will increase. And if you do it right your customer support costs will go down.
An interesting book to read is The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko.

For example, you sell products. In your enterprise application you discount the price of a certain product. You could post this automatically to your companies Facebook page, with a link to your web shop.

Or when you are an insurance company you could scan your database for a specific target audience, try to find these people on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and invite them to watch a YouTube video that is interesting for them.

A lot of this possible in the current Uniface 9.4. I just finished a Proof of Concept for integrating Uniface desktop applications with the Facebook API and it works very nice. The biggest hurdle to take was to implement the authorization mechanism. Facebook uses the upcoming OAuth 2.0 standard for that, and many more sites are starting to use this standard so now they should also be easy to connect too.

Over the next weeks I will make a sample so Uniface developers can take a look at how we did it.

PS
Go visit the iCU2011 on May 10th a preview of Uniface 9.5. With the new JavaScript options yet another world of web application integration opens up. And have a chat at the Uniface Services booth about your ideas for integrating Uniface applications with Social Media.