At this year’s COE and 3DEXPERIENCE World 2025 conferences, we explored a powerful tool for enterprise integration – Dassault Systèmes’ Enterprise Integration Framework (EIF) – and recently followed up with a webinar that dives even deeper into what makes EIF so effective for real-world system integration.
For anyone looking to bridge 3DEXPERIENCE with ERP, SharePoint, or other enterprise systems, this session is a must-watch.
Why EIF?
Today’s PLM environments don’t operate in isolation. Companies rely on integrations to ensure 3DEXPERIENCE can communicate with ERP systems and other tools across the enterprise. Whether you’re pushing item masters and BOM data to ERP on a release event, importing legacy product structures into 3DEXPERIENCE, or automating data exports to SharePoint, EIF provides the flexibility to do it – all while working in cloud or on-premise environments.
What Is EIF?
EIF is a role-based framework built into 3DEXPERIENCE and designed to support:
- Exports of CAD files, BOMs, and metadata
- Imports of product structures, documents, and non-CAD data
- Migrating from Designer Central to UPS OnCloud
- Triggers based on lifecycle events like promote, revise, or create
- Custom middleware or commercial iPaaS integration
- Queue-based messaging for scalable, asynchronous communication
On cloud, EIF simplifies your integration needs by handling authentication, message brokering (via ActiveMQ), and event publishing out of the box. For on-premise, EIF offers robust customization and authentication options with support for batch service users and alternate brokers like Apache Kafka.
Real-World Example: SOLIDWORKS to SharePoint
During the webinar, we demoed a practical scenario: a SOLIDWORKS part saved to 3DEXPERIENCE triggers EIF to export files and metadata to SharePoint. This included native files, step XML, and derived outputs—delivered automatically and invisibly to the user, thanks to EIF’s listener services and export jobs.
Developer Notes from Ilan Madjar
The second half of the webinar took a more technical turn, with Ilan providing a step-by-step breakdown of the export process using REST APIs. Although the focus was primarily on the export process, the import process was briefly addressed as well and is similar simply in the reverse order:
- Listen for lifecycle events (e.g., promote, create)
- Create export job and define what to extract
- Submit export job to start processing
- Get data and stream/download results including native files, metadata, and reports
- Retry as necessary
He also covered advanced topics like durable queue models, authentication methods (basic auth and OAuth 2.0), server-side services, and supported file formats (SOLIDWORKS, CATIA V5, AutoCAD, etc.).
For developers or architects, this portion of the webinar is a valuable reference for building your own middleware or configuring iPaaS platforms like Boomi.
Key Takeaways
- EIF is your go-to solution for integrating 3DEXPERIENCE with external systems, whether cloud or on-premise.
- It supports both exports and imports of product data, metadata, and documents. Plus, it can be used for mass data migrations.
- You can use EIF with third-party iPaaS tools or develop your own middleware.
- Real-time event listening and durable queues help ensure robust, asynchronous data flows.
This session was originally presented at COE 2025 and 3DEXPERIENCE World 2025, and is now available to watch on-demand. Watch the webinar replay now.
