There are a variety of reasons that you may wish to share data from your SMS|Host system and solutions are available to meet those needs. An extensive list of interfaces has been jointly developed by SMS and our vendor partners to support direct integration with their products. Your property likely has a number of these, seamlessly providing benefits to you and your guests. However, there are many 3rd party products that offer valuable services that are completely external to your system, yet require access to your data.
In keeping with our security policies, SMS does not support the direct harvesting of your information, sometimes referred to as “data scraping”. However, to meet these needs, SMS has developed our Secure Data Extract (SDE) Exports providing inexpensive, safe, automated, one-way distribution of the material necessary for these vendors to offer their facilities. SDEs are available today with 20+ companies providing services from digital marketing, business intelligence an d revenue analysis to customer relationship management and texting including Revinate, Datavision, Inntopia, Kalibri Labs, Zingle and many more. This generic SDE Data Sheet provides details on the concept and your SMS Account Manager can work with your property to address your needs.
Sometimes, a vendor’s requirements are even simpler and there are existing reports or utilities that can meet their needs. To address these, SMS can install a Scheduled File Export (SFE) to automate the transmission of that data. This works particularly well with the rapidly growing number of reports in SMS|Host that offer an optional output in Comma Separated Value or CSV format. While these are designed for you to open in Microsoft Excel, they are also perfectly suited for vendors to extract that same data and use it to support their products. Other services that can benefit from an SFE include Accounting systems working with the contents of the Back Office Interface or submitting the daily Smith Travel Research (STAR) report for tracking market share and competitive analysis. SFEs are extremely inexpensive and work seamlessly with Batch Reporting Tasks in your Automated Night Audit. This SFE Data Sheet offers an overview and your SMS Account Manager can guide you in determining how best to take advantage of this approach.
Our objective in each case is to provide affordable automated solutions to your integration needs while maintaining a safe and secure environment for your data.
Next time, we’ll take a look at best practices for managing your historical data.
