OIC API Catalog and Portal Overview

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to an introduction to the OIC API Catalog and Portal, by digitalML.

The OIC Catalog aims to aid in capturing and making sense of all your enterprise’s OIC projects & integrations in one place, while the OIC portal works in tandem to promote those integrations you desire more consumption of, resulting in greater efficiency & speeding innovation.

Let's take a quick look at their functionality.

First, you'll want to connect and portal to your OIC environment. Navigate to the Catalog, and under Import, there underneath the hamburger menu will be OIC Credentials. Fill out these relevant fields and select update. On doing so, your OIC environment will be connected.

Now that you're connected, you can populate the catalog. To do so, select any of the projects that have appeared from your OIC environment and utilize the in catalog import wizard to move forward. You'll get a note about the status of the import, whether its been completed or not, uhm, and notably once imported, connection to your catalog will stay active. Any changes made to the project will automatically be pushed into the catalog, and if they've already been pushed to the portal, the portal as well.

Now, upon import, we can take at a look at how that information is stored in the catalog. Here, it's stored in OIC Projects and OIC Integrations. Those OIC Projects are going to store the abstracted view of the Integration, letting users know at a glance what this integration's function and purpose is.

The Integration view, meanwhile, is going to store the metadata, it's going to store all that captured from OIC. This can also include attachments, any relevant JSON or Text Files, PDFs, etcetera. And it can also store any references to other websites, context, licenses, etcetera. In addition, if this is information that you want pushed to the Portal that consumers should be able to see, you can choose to select publish and make sure it occurs.

Speaking of deploying to the Portal, you can do so by clicking on Deploy to Portal, using these double arrows, and confirming whether we want to publish. If it already is published, like this integration here, you can unpublish it, if you no longer require it to be in the portal.

Let's take a look at the Portal. Here, we're going to see recently viewed, favorite APIs, and any alerts that may have come in, which can be found here. Now when we're looking through, we can take a peak and see how that information is stored. Your consumers are going to have a large opportunity here, not just to navigate these cream of the crop Integrations you've pushed to the portal, but being able to actually interact with the Providers themselves, whether its through comment providing feedback, or asking questions and requests, allowing them to aid in improving your integrations themselves.

But they can also get API Access through an API Access form. While the form exists to start, you have full control over what this information looks like. Back in the catalog if you go underneath Portal Management, there is an API Access Form Configuration tab. This field is completely configurable, and will reflect in the Consumer Portal what the users will actually see.

In addition to all of this, there is the Documentation tab and the Attachment tab, Attachment taking into account what has been pushed through from OIC. With the Documentation, notably, this is mock try-it-out functionality. So this could be information they can actually try and test themselves. By doing so, it will allow you to let consumers really understand what they are looking to gain access to and understand your integrations and APIs themselves.

Also importantly there are email notifications. You can choose to subscribe for updates from these different APIs in the portal. Now, users can, in their profile, choose to add their email, which will active it, and allow any responses to comments, responses to the get API access form etc to appear and get emailed to them.

But if you don't want emails to be sent out like that, you can go back to the catalog, under email notifications, and choose to configure who, what emails get sent out for, portal requests, catalog replies, etc. You can also configure what a valid email is in the first place, as well as additional information.

Now, through all of this work here, we can also see some relevant information about your catalog environment. Through reports, we can see Integrations by the interface type, how many APIs exist in the catalog, and how many you've pushed to the portal itself.

With all that said, you have a great catalog and portal, but maybe you want to customize it to better fit what you're looking for and what you want your users to be seeing. Well you can brand the environments to what you like. For the catalog, there is branding for logos, colors some border radius etcetera. The portal has a similar field in portal management, under portal branding. You have similiar fields, and in addition to that, smoe additional messaging that can be manipulated here.

With all that said, this concludes our overview of the OIC API Catalog and Portal, by digitalML. Thank you for listening, and happy integrating.