Looking to find out what Point Of Sale (POS) systems are supported in Transact. The documentation does not mention any by brand. Does anyone have any experience with Transact? What POS systems have you integrated to Milestone Professional via Transact?
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Milestone Xprotect Transact 2016 R2
Josh Hendricks
Jan 24, 2017I hope the community can point out some specific POS makes/models here, but I can comment on the technical aspects of Transact.
Out of the box, Transact includes two "connectors" which are essentially plugins to allow receipt of transaction data to be processed/stored. The included connectors are the TCP client, and serial connectors.
The TCP client connector is designed to make an outbound connection to the POS, or probably more commonly a physical "serial server" device like the Lavalink DataTap-IP. There are other similar devices but this is the only one I've personally used.
In the early days of XProtect Transact, integrations were almost exclusively done via TCP serial servers like the one above which can be placed between the POS and the printer, essentially eavesdropping on the serial side and allowing access to that stream over TCP.
Nowadays, a lot of (most?) POS systems are network-enabled and include the ability to send transactions over the network to a specific IP address and port. Unfortunately they do not commonly listen for inbound network connections for clients wanting to receive transactions and thus often do not work directly with the TCP client connector included in Transact.
I have written a TCP server connector plugin on the side which enables direct integration of POS systems with the ability to make outbound connections to send transactions. In theory a broad range of POS software should work using that plugin, but I don't have a list for you.
We (Milestone) have a solution partner called Gulfcoast Software Solutions who integrate with a number of POS as well, including some Micros units. I'm not sure if they have updated their plugins to work with the 2016 version of Transact but it's worth checking.
Jared Tarter
Jan 24, 2017I can confirm that Gulfcoast Software Solutions has updated their integration to work with Transact 2016.
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Jan 24, 2017"I have written a TCP server connector plugin on the side which enables direct integration of POS systems with the ability to make outbound connections to send transactions."
Is this something you developed personally, or is this something that is available from Milestone?
Josh Hendricks
Jan 24, 2017It's something I developed personally, and have sold a handful of licenses for. I have suggested that we actually include this or a similar plugin in XProtect Transact out of the box, and will continue to do so as I think it would make the product so much easier for our partners to sell/install. Until then I offer my plugin where it's needed as it has enabled sales which may have fallen through otherwise.
The plugin can be installed and used without a license for testing/demo purposes. Just restart the Event Server once an hour as the plugin will shut itself down after an hour if no license is supplied. I am offering it at $99 USD/POS.
Given that I'm not really available for phone support, one of our MSP's like Gulfcoast Software Solutions might be a more commercially suitable option (and maybe cheaper?). It's also not terribly difficult for a developer to write a Transact plugin. A working sample is provided in our SDK.
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