Integrating a biometrics into Navision HR

asembereng

Hi, we want a finger print device that will just log in and log out users and we want this data to be dump on the HR employee time management system. Any known system that will do this?

jlandeen

That sounds like an interesting idea and I can see the uses for logging time and job type details but I can't think of any process or add on currently in Navision that supports that.

As there is no biomtetric functionality currently in Nav it may be easier to work with an outside application (just a quick google search lead me to http://www.aditime.com and http://www.paypunch.com). As there are legal and ethical implications with Biometric and personal information I would be careful what kind of data is kept in Navision.

Integrations in previous versions could be accomplished various was with a NAS and now they are even easier with the web service capabilities of Nav 2009. This allows you to use software on the employee side that is tailored to working with biometrics & tracking in/out data and then just feed the appropriate data into Navision so that HR & Payroll processes can be run with a minimum of data duplication or user involvement.

asembereng

Being checking software for that and i am using one which is writing the time in time out in an access database. How best do u thing i can make it write into Navision DB?

jlandeen

I find there are a lot of things to consider in these integration proejcts - does it need to be real time processing or batch, what compents/architecture are currently in place, how error proof does the system have to be?

Do you have control of the system/code that writes files to the access database? Could those be re-directed to a SQL database? If so is your Navision system running on SQL? My gut feel on this one is that a batched staging table based approach would be the simplest solution - but it would not function in a real time fashion.

I do have a whitepaper that I've put together on integrations that may help you understand a few options better - feel free to private message me & I'll send it to you (I really have been meaning to post it somewhere but haven't had the time).

asembereng

We do not have access to the source code and the software can as well write to a mssql server but our navision db is running on a native server not mssql. It doesn't matter whether batch or real time. I will probably go for batch. And also i tried using odbc to redirect it to Navision database but its complaining for specific tables not found. If i want to recreate all the tables from access i will be creating 39 tables which doesn't seem smart to me at all and its time consuming. Any better approach?

jlandeen

Ok well that does help constrain what your options are. A user driven or NAS based approach that is fired on the Navision side to go and get information from the Access database is probably your best bet as being something that requires a minimum amount of re-development. I've seen this work in the past hooking Nav up to a MySQL database using ADO - the same approach could work for Access (as ADO works very well with Access).

asembereng

I have never used ADO nor worked on application server (NAS). I have checked on some codes sometime back on ADO connectivity and it sounds pretty cool. Any faster way to learn ADO and implement this? I have until monday to do this. Or maybe if you have ever seen one ado connectivity to mysql can you forward it to me. I might be able to make it connect to navision.
Thanks got the whitepaper.

asembereng

I have never used ADO nor worked on application server (NAS). I have checked on some codes sometime back on ADO connectivity and it sounds pretty cool. Any faster way to learn ADO and implement this? I have until monday to do this. Or maybe if you have ever seen one ado connectivity to mysql can you forward it to me. I might be able to make it connect to navision.
Thanks got the whitepaper.

Ramshri

Hello asembereng

CAMS Biometric attendance machines supports the Web API which you can use for integrating the machine with your server. As per the API Documentation , you need to expose an URL which will be associated with the attendance machine. After the association, every time a attendance gets registered, the associated URL will be called. Now under the URL, you can handle the attendance detail and store in your database.

Thanks
Ramshri