Legacy platform

Integration guidelines for the legacy platform

Ensure you follow these guidelines to enable integration of Sterling™ Order Management System with external systems.

  • You can define the design and integration points and can test the integrations. During the onboarding process, you must submit a network integration worksheet that lists the domain names or IP addresses and ports for inbound and outbound flows. The onboarding team then reviews the information. You must also log a CASE with the IBM's network team to enable the IP addresses and ports in the worksheet.
  • Ensure that all outbound communication to a third-party system is encrypted.
  • You must provide all public source and respective target IP ranges or domain names, and public listening ports. Document each IP or domain name with a business flow description such as WMS, SAP, and Payment Gateway for auditing purposes and for enabling external communication.
  • If you are integrating Sterling Order Management System with an external service that has dynamic IP addresses, you must provide the endpoint to be enabled for external communication.
  • When a target outbound destination is provided in the domain name format and the actual IP might change, Sterling Order Management System assigns a Virtual IP address (VIP) to the target domain name for enabling the IP address for the outbound flows.
  • The document considers only the public IP or domain names and ports to be enabled for outbound communication. The worksheet need not contain any private IP addresses or local application ports.
  • Note the following points if dynamic IP is used for outbound connections through port 443:
    • You must provide the DNS (usually the integration DNS name).
    • The IBM network team assigns an internal VIP that points to the DNS.
    • IBM sets up the VIP on your host file of the OM application servers.
    • The IBM network team also sets up the load balancer, if necessary.
    • You must use normal DNS reference when you are configuring or coding to access the dynamic IP or DNS.
    • The IBM network team enables the outbound public IP that is provided by the organization in the worksheet. The DNS for dynamic IP is configured in the host file.
    • You can run tests for integration points and inform IBM if any issues arise.
  • Ensure that you have imported all external certificates to the Sterling Order Management System environment by using Self Service through the Self Service process. For more information, see Importing certificates on the legacy platform.
  • First, integration is set up for the Development and QA environments. After you confirm that the integration testing is complete, integration is set up for the Pre-production and Production environments.
    Note: You must complete the same operations in each environment.
  • Client integration with Sterling Order Management System uses the MQ Client channel by default. You must specify specific MQ message header parameters and values to ensure that messages that are placed in the client queues are processed in Sterling Order Management System.
    Note: By default, all the messages of type javax.jms.TextMessage are processed in Sterling Order Management System and it does not explicitly check for MQ headers during processing of such messages. For more information about how to drop a message of type javax.jms.TextMessage to IBM MQ, see JMS message types and conversion.
    For Sterling Order Management System to process these messages, you must provide the following parameters and values. By default, Sterling Order Management System is configured to process text-based messages. SI users must use the standard MQ Client to browse the messages in queues where header detail is available.
    The following example shows a correctly formatted header, which can be processed by Sterling Order Management System.
    StrucId : 'MD ' Version : 2
Report  : 64 MsgType : 8
Expiry  : -1 Feedback : 0
Encoding : 273 CodedCharSetId : 1208
Format : 'MQSTR'
Priority : 5 Persistence : 1
MsgId : X'414D51204F4D5F514D47522020202020520CB65BE5F15A2C'
CorrelId : X'D34DF8E3CE78FDD69E6FFE386B8FDB7F4EBF73D7766F8F77'
BackoutCount : 0
ReplyToQ      : '       '
ReplyToQMgr   : 'OM_QMGR
Consider the following points when you raise a request for enabling outbound communication to add domain names and ports:
  • Web Service connections use port 443, while MQ uses port 1415. By default, both ports are opened and no further action is required.
  • If you require a Dynamic IP address type to be added, you must enter the full endpoint URL.
  • If you want to request for multiple Dev or QA environments, you must specify the environments.