Category Archives: News

Important updates about iNTERFACEWARE and our products

Conversations From HIMSS11

 ·  by Eliot  · Leave a comment

Now that I’m back and well rested from the whirlwind of HIMSS, I wanted to share some of what I personally experienced at the conference.

Firstly, I was quite taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response that our new approach to integration received. The unveiling of the Iguana Translator platform was a great success! Out of over 500 people who visited our booth, I can count the number of people who didn’t like our new approach on one hand.

I had a lot of interesting conversations at the show.

I spoke with an integration engineer from Chicago, who had worked with Cloverleaf. She explained to me how her team found that they had much better maintainability and ease of development when they kept to the TCL scripting side of the engine rather than utilizing the graphical mapper. She expressed excitement about the concept of being able to see what code is doing as it’s being written as well as modifying interfaces from within a web browser.

The Brave New World of Middleware – Part 5

 ·  by Eliot  · Leave a comment

Part 5: Redesigning the Modern Interface Engine

As HIMSS is right around the corner, I’m growing increasingly excited to showcase Iguana v5: our redesign of the modern interface engine.

In previous posts in this blog series, I’ve explored the headaches faced by integration engineers, the complexities in the economics of integration and the failed promise of graphical mappers.

I challenged myself to question the old assumptions of integration. I challenged my company to refuse to accept the limitations of integration engines in terms of visibility and control that users can have over their interfaces.

We changed the question we were asking ourselves from “How can we achieve integration without code?” to “How can we make code based integration work better?“. Not only did we find the answer, we’ve also opened the door to endless integration possibilities in the process.

Now I ask you to challenge yourself. Challenge not only what you expect from an interface engine but also challenge what you can do when integration is truly made easy.

I invite you to begin that challenge with Iguana v5. To explore more about what the latest version of Iguana offers please visit our Re-Thinking Integration page.

We will be proudly demonstrating the capabilities of Iguana v5 at HIMSS in Orlando next week. I personally encourage you to take the time to stop by our booth #3621 to see it in action.

I would also like to express my appreciation to those of you who have reached out to me over the past few weeks to offer your opinions and support of our new approach to middleware. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the discussions that we’ve had.

Eliot Muir
President and CEO, iNTERFACEWARE™

Remember to subscribe to our blog or follow us on twitter (twitter.com/interfaceware) for product updates, future resources and discussions.

The Brave New World of Middleware – Part 1

 ·  by Eliot  · Leave a comment

Part 1: Re-thinking Integration

There is a great deal of excitement around the offices of iNTERFACEWARE these days and I wanted to personally reach out to you and explain what all the buzz is about.

Over the past few years, I have invested a great deal of time and energy into re-thinking my assumptions about what middleware needs to deliver.

My expectations of what is needed are drastically different now than they were back in 1997, when I wrote the first version of Chameleon.

In fact, nearly a decade and a half later, there is only one core assumption that remains unchanged. The goal of middleware remains the same: to provide value by minimizing the cost of maintaining interfaces.

Unfortunately, in software it is all too easy to get lost in the weeds and lose sight of the real-world problems of your customers while you wrestle with the internals of your own code. By stepping back and seeing the actual problems for what they are, we can often find more elegant solutions.

Iguana 4.5 officially released

 ·  by Nasron  · Leave a comment

In case you haven’t heard or noticed, we removed the beta tag off of Iguana 4.5 today. The entire development team has been anticipating this release for quite some time and we are pleased to officially release it to the public.

Since we released 4.5 in beta two months ago, we’ve done extensive testing to reach our goals for stability and performance. We would also like to thank users who downloaded the beta version and submitted useful feedback.

Some of the key new features in Iguana 4.5 include:

  • FTP Support
  • Faster Log Searching
  • Improved Message Resubmission
  • Enhanced User Management

Prior to the release today, I had the opportunity to hold a webinar to highlight the new features and answer a few questions from those who attended. The 15 minute recorded webinar can be viewed below:

Iguana 4.5 Feature Webinar

I welcome you to view this webinar or schedule a more personalized demo by filling out this form.

As always, the latest release is available from our downloads page here.

Feedback is always welcome.

Cheers,

Nasron

What is Meaningful Use?

 ·  by Mike  · Leave a comment

If you have any relation to the healthcare industry in the US then chances are that you’ve heard the term meaningful use countless times and unless you’re heavily involved with healthcare IT then there’s a good chance that the term is confusing.

If that’s the case then this video is for you. We’ve been hearing the term meaningful use for two years now and it’s just as vague as ever for some of us and with the release of the stage one final rules a couple of months ago, the chatter only seems to be getting louder.

So for those of you without a highly technical background, I’ve created this fun and hopefully informative video that attempts to answer the burning question: What is Meaningful Use?

Enjoy.

What is Meaningful Use?

This video – entitled: “What is Meaningful Use?“, along with all of our existing – and future – educational videos can be found on the new site in our HL7 Video Vault.

– Mike

What if… HL7 was truly made easy?

 ·  by Art  · 5 Comments

Today, we here at iNTERFACEWARE are very pleased to announce the launch of our newly redesigned website: http://www.interfaceware.com

The first thing people seem to notice from our website – and the same goes for our appearances at trade shows and other industry events – is our tag line: “HL7 Integration Made Easy“. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had that have started with: “…you had me at Easy!”.

One of the things we’re most proud of here at iNTERFACEWARE is the fact that we’ve been able to make HL7 workable, understandable, implementable, … and even easy for our customers.

For those who are just starting their HL7 explorations and may be wondering, “How do you make HL7 easy?”,  I thought I’d put a new video together to help you get started.

Transforming HL7 Messages – The Movie

 ·  by mdomiati  · Leave a comment

From Art:

Thanks to my newest video-recruit – Mo – we now have a new addition to our “The Movie” series of videos.  This time around, Mo explains how to easy it can be to transform HL7 messages using Iguana and Chameleon.

For those of you who’ve been waiting for a new animated feature from iNTERFACEWARE, don’t worry, I’m just putting the finishing touches on my newest instalment as I type this.  In the meantime, we thought we’d offer a practical solution to our newer customers who are attempting to transform HL7 messages for the first time.

With that said, I’ll pass this post over to Mo to introduce his brand new tutorial video: Transforming HL7 messages.

What does an HL7 message look like?

 ·  by Art  · 10 Comments

When I created my first animated video – How does HL7 work? – I never imagined it would have the reach and impact it did.  In the few short weeks since it was released, the video has found its way onto dozens of corporate blogs, industry publications and personal sites.  It seems the interest in HL7 – especially when explained in plain English – is very high!

As the comments rolled in, a number of viewers requested a more technical HL7 overview video.   Not wanting to disappoint my “fans”, I thought I’d give it a shot.

It’s a good thing I’m always up for a challenge because as much as I love HL7 – and really, don’t we all – creating an HL7 tutorial to explain an HL7 message’s pipes, carets, tildes and ampersands isn’t exactly an easy task.

Have a look at my follow-up video – What does an HL7 message look like? – and let me know what you think.  Did I manage to capture the important elements of an HL7 message in a fun way?

New and Improved Members Website

 ·  by kevin.senn  · Leave a comment

This morning I finished up what I hope will just be “Phase 1″ in improving iNTERFACEWARE’s Members website. The interface for viewing existing licenses has been simplified, making it much easier to find the license(s) you’re looking for. Now browsing through your company’s licenses is quick, easy, and maybe even a little fun. And you can even export your company’s licenses as a CSV file, with which you can create an Excel spreadsheet for your own reference.

This is response to the fact that many customers now have hundreds of licenses which made the old interface a little cumbersome.  Love to hear your feedback on the new interface.

Happy browsing!

-Kevin

Iguana Under Stress

 ·  by Joanna  · Leave a comment

We know that by simply using our products our customers are putting a huge amount of confidence and trust in us. The health related data that flows through our applications is highly sensitive and affects the potential well being of many people. This is a fact that we do not look upon lightly and is the reason we put our software through many tests before every release.

Not only do we test every new feature for correct functionality and usability we also put Iguana through very rigorous stress tests. We send hundreds of thousands of messages through test Iguana servers to confirm that Iguana doesn’t buckle under pressure and, more importantly, that Iguana doesn’t lose or corrupt any messages.