Connecting the Systems You Already Have

The short version

Most of the value in internal building is not new data. It is connecting information you already own and currently retype. A few ideas carry most of the weight. An API is a documented way for two systems to exchange information. Authentication is how the other system knows it is you, and its credentials need protecting like any other key. Read access and write access are very different conversations: reading from CAD to build a report is a modest request, writing back into it is not. Beyond that: webhooks push to you when something happens, rather than you asking repeatedly. Exports are the fallback when there is no API, and they age badly. Rate limits cap how often you may ask, and they will find you at the worst moment. Vendor support determines whether an interface is a product or a favour. Ownership decides who fixes it when it breaks. Logging is how you find out what happened. And a test environment is what keeps you from learning all of this in production. Ask your vendor for the API documentation before you plan anything. If there is no documentation, there is no integration, whatever the sales conversation suggested.