Before getting started
In this article, we outline technical considerations and what's needed to ensure a successful AIM integration for your agency.
Technical Installation Details
The Integration Client (IC) must be installed on-premises so that it could access the MSSQL machine over the private network. Ideally, the IC could be installed on the machine hosting the MSSQL server itself, but could connect to a copy of the live database if the field names are the same, and entry was granted through your firewall.
Once the IC is installed, the user is then able to configure the hostname and port on which the MSSQL machine is set up. The firewall of the MSSQL machine and the server software must be set up to allow connecting over the network. Also, the user will need to configure the IC to use a user account for MSSQL, which is going to be used to query insurance policy transactions. This means that the user account must have at least read-only access to some of the tables from the database (or copy of the database) used by AIM software.
For the IC to integrate with InsCipher properly, we decided to keep a persistent connection to our Integration Management Servers (IMS). This is achieved by leveraging "socket" technology. For this to work, the IC must be able to connect to IMS over the internet (HTTP on port 80), and then maintain a connection using the in-built socket.io client (the same port 80 is used). This approach lets us have flexibility and control over when the import jobs should be initiated.
Using the MSSQL access credentials that you will be able to set up in the IC, it will regularly query the MSSQL database for new/updated insurance policy transactions. Once the IC is done querying (again, this is done multiple times, indefinitely, as long as the IC is active), it will need to send these results to one of our API endpoints (over HTTP, probably port 80).
Information extracted and imported into InsCipher is limited only to the fields listed in the mapping table above. Or in other words, those fields that are required for Surplus Lines filing and for the InsCipher Connect to function as designed. Not all of the information that can be imported into InsCipher through our API Endpoint will be imported due to some limitations in field mapping between AIM and InsCipher.
Should you have further technical questions, please reach out to [email protected], and we can put you in touch with a developer that can answer your questions.
Updated about 2 months ago