Unified Pos - VMS Support?

John Honovich

IPVM | 10/07/13 06:10pm

A VMS vendor is saying that they support "Unified PoS", which is an NRF "architectural specification for application interfaces to point-of-service devices that are used in the retail environment." It claims that "UnifiedPOS provides a consistent and exact framework for programming point of sales devices that is platform independent and vendor neutral."

It's like the ONVIF of PoS integration.

Anyone have any experience with this or using it with any VMSes?

Matt Ion

10/07/13 06:16pm

Never heard of it, but it sounds like it would probably have some of the same issues as ONVIF - broad support, at the expense of detail or usage-specific enhancements.

Morten Nielsen

In reply to Matt Ion | 10/07/13 07:19pm

A 2000 page spec... they must have thought of EVERYTHING :)

Seriously though, it's my impression that POS is getting harder to do well (fast and easy). In one instance we were unable to intercept the register->printer data (using an RS-something-or-other-splitter), and instead we interfaced with the stores giant backend database. From the data that was being stored about each transaction, we could re-construct a "synthetic" receipt, that looked somewhat like the real thing. All the query code to build the receipt was custom to this particular user, and couldn't be reused elsewhere.

The other problem I had with POS installs was that ANY issue that popped up after we had installed a splitter, would be on us. That means any problem in the POS database, printer problems, crashed POS PC's etc. was being blamed on us.

John Honovich

IPVM | In reply to Morten Nielsen | 10/07/13 07:26pm

Morten, my experience and understanding has been similar. Has anyone ever mentioned this Unified PoS to you before? I am trying to figure out if it works and who it works with.

Morten Nielsen

In reply to John Honovich | 10/07/13 07:27pm

I can't recall ever having heard of it; but it WAS a while ago that I worked on POS integrations.

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