What If Part of Your Application Is Someone Else?s Application?

[yakisha]

Sometimes an application uses parts of another application, possibly one that is owned by another company. For example, your company offers subscriptions to a magazine but another company does the fulfillment. Or your company offers investment plans but another company manages the plans and collects the information from your employees. So how do you show the “outside” application? Should you make the other application look the same as the internal application? Or should you provide a link and say, “Click here for that other application. You will leave our application when you do so”?

 

[Sachiel]

It depends. If the other application has a strong identity of its own, then you might want to be obvious about your use of the other company, even going so far as to open a new browser window.

If, on the other hand, you think, for example, that employees might be uncomfortable giving their 401K information to an outside company, you would probably want the connection to look as seamless as possible. In this case, you’d open the new application in the same window using your own corporate visual style, with the other company’s logo appearing discreetly in a corner somewhere.

 

[eleven]

Some good advice sachiel, I would intergrate it as sachiel says through the GUI. But you can for example take the data for the other application in the original app and for example setup a cronjob to feed the collected information, maybe hourly.