Is It Possible to Integrate Chris21 with SharePoint?

Chris21 is a surprisingly popular system for a large number of clients I work with, so I wanted to comment on a solution that may help unlock value for your company if you are using it.

What I’ve found working with a number of companies is that their Active Directory is often out of date (surprise surprise), yet Chris21 is, and must be up to date because they are using it as their Payroll system.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically update Active Directory based on information in Chris21? For example, finally the Manager or Contact Details of each employee might be accurate for once!

The flow on effect of this is that you can then have accurate SharePoint profiles. This can be a good approach when you’re initially setting up your SharePoint environment because you don’t need everyone to manually update them. Perhaps not an issue in a very small company, but for larger ones this is important. Then, if you want to empower your staff, and need to keep any fields up to date in Chris21 easily, well, then you have the ability to let users update their user profile fields and sync the data back into Chris21! This is pretty cool if you ask me.

Now, let’s take this solution a step further - what if you could stop sending those email or paper based Leave Request forms around and leverage a web based / electronic form? What if you already have a web based Leave Request form but it can’t really do much because the data just sits inside SharePoint and that’s it? How about instead of the form just sitting there, you leverage it instead, so that once a manager has approved a Leave Request, it is sent to Chris21 where the leave balance is automatically adjusted… wouldn’t that save a lot of time?

Well, the good news is that all of this is actually is possible. A while back I was fortunate enough to work with one of the few people I’ve met that had a good handle on both SharePoint & Chris21, and we implemented a solution to do this very successfully. As much as I would like to comment on the specifics, I’m unable to because the detailed solution is confidential IP owned by the company I work for - however I thought this post may still have value to at least mention what is possible in terms of the integration because looking around on the web now, there is very sparse content on this.

Essentially, the high level approach is that you can achieve the integration through the use of Chris21 web services - which does require additional licensing from Frontier.  The Chris21 web services only got us so far though so ultimately we ended up with additional custom code, which ended up working solidly, though was quite a headache to write and may very well have taken double or triple the time/budget if it weren’t for the expertise of a colleague who had previously worked on a similar project before.

Looking back on dollars invested vs. returned - does it seem worth it? For the companies that I’ve worked with, yes - namely because they were going to be ‘stuck’ with Chris21 for the next few years, they had staff members manually entering and processing leave requests in Chris21 and AD was way, way out of date.  Could it be worth it for you? Well, if you have staff manually entering data into Chris21 or use it as your primary source of truth for employee details then it very may well be.