Does Epicor Cloud Support Service Connect

Epicor ERP 10
1

Does Epicor Cloud Support Service Connect?
Any feedback regarding the customizations, custom reports, and integrations with Epicor?

2

Do not use service connect at this point. The tools is dead look into automation studio

3

Do we have access to our database in terms of queries? or generating ssrs reports?

4

The Service Connect runtime will work in the cloud moving forward but like Jose said, I wouldn’t develop anything new.

You do not have direct database access in the cloud. You can generate SSRS reports using RDD but you won’t be able to write SQL statements against the production database.

I’m going to have to trademark this question because I’ve been using it often recently:

What problem are you trying to solve?

5

We have a lot of integrations that are done using the Service connect and we want to know the advantages and disadvantages of moving to the Cloud.

6

The disadvantages to Service Connect are:

  • You’ll have to touch each integration with every upgrade to use newer DLLs.
  • Epicor isn’t actively developing it anymore. They WILL support you though, at least for awhile. So you won’t have to move off of SC in order to move to the cloud.

Your other choices for integrations are REST (including Epicor Functions) and starting with 2022.1, Automation Studio.

Advantages of REST & Functions

  • Loosely-coupled integrations for easier upgrades (No DLLs)
  • Finer Security Control
  • Can work with modern authentication providers like Azure AD or Epicor Identity

Disadvantage of REST & Functions

  • Something new to learn

Advantage of Automation Studio

  • Low code

Disadvantages of Automation Studio

  • Have to be on most recent version of Epicor (not an issue for most cloud users)
  • Still new, we don’t know its limits and how to deal with them
7

Thanks for the comparison, are we still able to do changes on the live BPMs, BAQs, and dashboards?

8

Yes, all of the functionality of BPMs, BAQs, and Dashboards are the there in the cloud.

External BAQs are not available however.

9

Note Service Connect Workflows can be changed to use REST, I’ve done a few so I don’t have to upgrade the Epicor Client through the upgrade and re-import the .NET references.

1 Like
10

That’s right @ReonD. It is coming off the price list though, so it falls in the same camp as Crystal, WCF, etc… It’ll work but support will get lighter over time.

11

Agreed, like Crystal we’re gradually moving things away from it :slightly_smiling_face:.

12

As others have said, you should not do any new development using Service Connect, even if you are staying on-Prem… Service connect is NOT End-Of-Lived YET, but we have removed it from the price list, and we will no longer sell it to new accounts. No new development will be done with it.
Service Connect IS compatible with cloud accounts as long as you use REST calls. You cannot run Service Connect on the Cloud instance. You must install it onto another server (on-prem, or your own cloud server). Therefore i would say that it is “partially” cloud compatible.
As others above reported, the replacement product is Automation Studio. It is an iPaaS product (integration Platform as a Service) and works for BOTH on-prem and cloud. Since it is iPaaS, and uses REST calls, there is a much smaller chance of your customizations breaking with an upgrade (although you should always test!!!).
Someone mentioned Crystal Reports… NOTE that we started replacing Crystal over 10 years ago, and declared it a non-supported product. it was replaced by SSRS. I believe that 10 years is ample time for eveyone to migrate away from Crystal. if you have not done so, you should consider it.