Due to the Coronavirus situation, this is a question I'm getting asked a lot at the moment. Property managers and the developers advising them recognise that they need an edge over their competitors if they're going to survive this new world we live and do business in.
So, can Jomres be used with your Channel Manager or PMS?
The answer isn't a simple binary yes or no, so in my traditional, verbose way I will explain further.
Theoretically, Jomres can be used with most Channel Managers or PMSs. The huge majority of them nowadays follow the OTA standard for sharing properties, availabilty and bookings with other sites, which helps a lot.
The problem is that each of these channel managers is a little bit different. They'll each have different methods for transferring information, or for authenticating connections. This means that as often as not, you need unique code to connect to each of them.
That's not a huge problem now that the CMF and it's associated plugins are available. They provide a set of features that allow a holistic approach to connecting to Jomres Core and as a result whether or not you can use your own Channel Manager or PMS depends on you, and them.
There are three routes to connecting to your Channel manager or PMS to your Jomres installation.
- Your CM or PMS connects directly to the Jomres CMF REST API. They manage the transfer of information in both directions. Once they have the code library to do this, then they have an advantage over their competitors because they will be able to re-use that library to connect to other Jomres based installations too.
- Your CM or PMS (or a developer that you've hired) builds their own Thin CMF plugin, which you then install on your Jomres site and configure as needed. Again, this thin plugin can be sold on by the developer and I have released my current set of thin plugins as open source to give them the foundational code they need to start down this path.
- I build a Thin CMF plugin for you. As there are a lot of people requiring CMF thin plugins, this may take some time and will not be cheap.
Which route you choose, ultimately, is your choice.
If you have any questions, please contact me to discuss them further.