Get access to 10+ NEW data sources - Help us test new connectors feature!

[Rachelgmoore]

Hi AppSheet Community!

We’ve been hard at work on some enhancements to the list of data sources you can connect to when building an app by extending our integration with Apigee to include support for Apigee Integration. Among other benefits, this will give you access to Apigee’s library of pre-built connectors to enable you to build apps off of hundreds of different data sources in the future.

While we’re still working on this feature, we need your help: We’re looking for a few customers to join a private preview of the expanded connector functionality and use a connector hosted on Apigee’s platform to build an AppSheet app. 

Interested?  

We’re looking for folks who:

1. Have an active AppSheet Enterprise subscription
2. Have an active Apigee X account (Standard, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus)
3. Are willing to provide feedback on your experience, note any bugs you might find, and act as a trusted advisor in advancing the AppSheet platform
4. Have one of the following data sources you’d like to access via VPC:

• Salesforce
• BigCommerce 
• Apache Kafka
• Cloud Spanner
• Cloud Pub/Sub
• MySQL 
• PostgreSQL
• Redis 
• ServiceNow 
• JIRA
• Cassandra

If you’re interested and meet these criteria, please reach out to me directly. From there, we’ll talk timelines and help you with the necessary set-up to get up and running.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Koichi_Tsuji]

In my gentle and honest opinion, you better go to Apigee community to call for the assistance and support rather than here AppSheet community for this test.  This is because of number of reasons. Firstly, not many people should be using Apigee daily, as it is dev tools, where coding knowledge is required. In addition, Apigee is super expensive (from my point of view), not readily available for average app creators right here in this community. (im one of them)   Taking into this account, only few enterprise company could afford Apigee to subscribe, I dont expect you would be able to get much of support here to conduct comprehensive testing.   

Even this feature is actually made generally available, probably just limited number of companies (just a few) could use such type of integration, wihle majority of the app creators not utilize such integration. In other words, no benefit at all.

While we don't get future access to such type of integation, there is no motivation to look into it. If we really want to do such integration we need to pay min 100k ish fees to subscribe other service, which wont economically make any sense. (as far as I know, the minimum subscription fees for Apigee starts from that kind of region.)　I never ever see the services, where we are asked to pay far more for sub-service (Apigee, just for connectors alone) against our primary servic (Appsheet).

All in all, this new connectors is presented to the existing Apigee users, instead of majority of AppSheet creator, that's why I suggest you ask to Apigee community rather than Appsheet.

Currently we have Salesforce native connector. To access it, we are not asked for the additional cost and fees, as it is "built-in" connector inside AppSheet. I personnelly hoped the similar built-in connector will come into play, but my expectation was wrong, unfortunately.

Power Apps is providing bunch of native and built in connectors, including bunch of Google services, such as Gmail, tasks , contacts for those  we do not have native connector inside AppSheet. Power Apps at least not asking for any additional cost and fees for such native connectors as they are built in.  I m afraid this will leave appsheet far behind Power App in terms of connection/integration with other services. For this part I have to admit Power Apps are well ahead of us.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/connector-reference/connector-reference-powerapps-connec...

Thank you.

@pravse 

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Same story applies to Scandit integration.... I wonder who are using that integration.

[Rachelgmoore]

Thank you so much, Koichi, for the candid response. This is EXACTLY the type of feedback I was hoping for in response to this post: is there immediate interest? If there isn't, why not? Is there a way we can make this connector integration more useful in the short term? What are the biggest blockers to use? And so on.

One idea we've toyed around with is offering free access to Apigee for a limited amount of time so folks can experiment with the connectors, but I hear your feedback that in its current form, this integration is really more a feature of Apigee rather than AppSheet.

I don't have concrete next steps to share just yet, but I'll share them when I do. In the meantime, I just wanted to say thank you again for your candid feedback.

[zito]

Hi Koichi,

It's worth adding some context here - the long-term plan is not to require customers to buy apigee X or apigee integration to get access to this broader library of connectors because, as you point out, Apigee can be quite expensive (though there is work on the Apigee side to open up more affordable scenarios for small deployments, but that is not directly germane to your point). 

Long-term we want to separate out the connector infrastructure, so that it can be used independently of Apigee, and without the associated cost.  AppSheet will have its own native connectors, which will continue to be developed and enhanced, and then there will be this connector infrastructure that larger organizations can use to handle the longer tail of enterprise connectors and deployment scenarios.

We're not there yet, of course, and Rachel and the team are working on figuring out the right ordering and priorities, which is the source of this particular post.  We wanted to speak to organizations who could effectively simulate the future state because they are already using the connector technology w/ Apigee.

To your larger point, having a large and powerful ecosystem of connectors is strategically important for AppSheet in particular, but also for Google Cloud as a whole.   We already have a few different products where there's the concept of a connector platform - Data Studio, for example.  Long-term it doesn't make a lot of sense for us to write one Jira connector for AppSheet, one for Apigee, one for Data Studio, one for BigQuery, etc. - so we would like to find a way to solve this problem holistically.  Ideally, it would be transparent to AppSheet app creators whether they were using a "native" connector or a connector from another system.

We're obviously nowhere near that today, and Rachel's post shouldn't be taken to mean that the path forward is set  - she's just looking at how we might get a better sense of how organizations might want to use non-AppSheet connectors in more complex scenarios.  

Appreciate the feedback, though, and happy to answer any other questions you might have.  

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Thank you @zito @Rachelgmoore for your comment, and appreciate for sharing your insight and roadmaps, which is always good to know to see where AppSheet is moving forward towards the future.

We always prefer easy-peasy set ups to connect the external sources from AppSheet to build a new connection rather than moving out from AppSheet world to other platform, which will add more complex. I sincerely hope this will happen in the near future.

For the time being, I m interested in this new integration, but unfortunately we dont have active apigee account, so we are not meeting prerequisite for testing.  It could be different subject, but I'm pretty much interested in new independent Data Portal connector. Hope we would be able to test it soon. Thank you.

[pravse]

Including @zito