Getting Started With ConceptShare

Getting started with ConceptShare APIs

The purpose of this article is to answer some common questions for those beginning to explore ConceptShare's APIs and to provide a general outline to help you navigate the Developer Resource articles.

How are Developer Resources articles organized?

Concepts are the logical starting point; recommended to be read in sequence, these articles cover the high level systems, design paradigms, and general architectural details one must understand and consider before one can successfully plan and design an integration.

Guides are more detailed and procedural articles; often delving deeper into specific subsystems or product features. This is where you will find tutorials and step-by-step guides that cover implementation details that are useful once you've established a general integration approach.

Learning Aids are multimedia presentations showcasing existing integrations, product and technology demos, walk-through and other supplementary content to help cement your understanding of topics encountered in the Concepts and Guides sections.

What will I need to start testing ConceptShare's APIs?

• Regardless of whether you choose to work with ConceptShare's SOAP APIs or go the route of embedding the Review Dialog and its REST APIs; at a minimum, you will require a ConceptShare account with API access enabled, and an active user in that account.
• Access to ConceptShare's API are not typically enabled by default. You will need to contact your Deltek Customer Success Manager or Deltek Sales Representative and they will take the appropriate steps to enable API access for your account.
• Unless explicitly permitted by Deltek, we discourage the use of accounts in production environments as development test platforms. Whether you're an existing customer or partner, or if you're new to ConceptShare and wish to explore the potential to build a custom integration, we ask that you please notify your Customer Success Manager (for existing customers) or speak to your Deltek Sales Representative (if you're not yet a customer) and they will put you in touch with subject matter experts who can answer your questions and allocate suitable test environments in order for you to conduct your testing.
• For integrations that are expected to go beyond proof-of-concept, there will be a need for at least one, if not several, staging environments for testing and QA and eventually production releases. As you proceed and refine your integration requirements with your Deltek Customer Success Manager or Deltek Sales Representative, they will put you in touch with subject matter experts who can advise and provision such staging environments.

Will I need API Keys?

• The Review Dialog and REST APIs don't require any additional keys
• The SOAP API may require PARTNER KEYS, but only if you are planning to use admin level API endpoints, which is the equivalent of acting as an instance administrator. This is typical for OEM integrations where a host application would control its own ConceptShare instance, and administrator all aspects of the accounts, users, permissions, and data within that instance via the API.

Next steps

• Learn more about ConceptShare's integration capabilities; read An Integration Overview of ConceptShare
• See the article Sample Integrations with ConceptShare for a video walk-through of what sample integrations can look like.