Introduction

ION is a new generation of business middleware that is lighter weight, less technically demanding to implement, and built on open standards.

In addition to connectivity with ION, you get workflow and business event monitoring in a single, consistent architecture. ION uses an event-driven architecture. It can pro-actively push data, work activities, and exception notifications to users. The ION Suite includes several powerful services to install and configure.

This diagram shows the ION Suite services:

ION Suite services diagram

ION Connect

With ION Connect you can establish connections between applications, which can either be Infor applications or third party applications. A set of connectors is available to connect many types of resources such as Infor applications, databases, message queues, or files. This varies from cloud or on premises. In ION you can model document flows between applications. Such flows can represent a business process. But also more technical flows can be defined. For example, you can define a flow to map data from a third party application to a standard business object document as used by an Infor application. You can also use filtering or content-based routing.

Workflow

In Workflow you can model business processes. A workflow can include tasks to be executed by a user, notifications to be sent to a user, decisions, parallel flows and loop backs. The modeling is done graphically. Workflows can be used to automate approval processes, and for other types of business processes. For example, you can define a review flow consisting of several parallel tasks that are sent to multiple users to review the same document.

Event Management

Using Event Management you can monitor business events that are based on business rules. Users receive an alert when an exception occurs.

For example, users may receive an alert in these situations:

  • A stock quantity is low.
  • A shipment is late.
  • A contract must be renewed.

Activities

With Activities you can follow what happens in your organization. Either by following specific business documents or by following alerts, tasks or notifications.