Questions & Answers
Integration Hub — Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the questions municipal IT teams, data stewards, and executives ask most often about deploying and operating a municipal integration platform.
The Civic Integration Hub is a purpose-built integration platform that connects all of a municipality's systems — financial (tax, utility, ERP), citizen-facing (CRM, permits, recreation), provincial (MPAC, Teranet, ServiceOntario), and legacy systems — into a unified, managed data ecosystem. Most municipalities have 15–30+ systems with hundreds of data flows between them, many undocumented. The Hub replaces fragile FTP scripts, manual spreadsheet transfers, and single-person-dependency integrations with automated, monitored, auditable data flows. It includes Master Data Management for creating single 'golden records' per citizen, property, and business across all systems.
Three fundamental differences: (1) Municipal-specific content — pre-built connectors for MPAC, Teranet, ServiceOntario, Canadian banks, and Civic Suite modules; master data matching rules tuned for Canadian municipal entities; Municipal Transform Pack for roll number formatting, PSAB codes, and legal descriptions. Generic ESBs require you to build all of this. (2) Source code ownership — you own the source code outright. No per-connector licensing, no per-message fees, no vendor lock-in. Generic ESBs charge ongoing per-connection or per-volume fees that escalate annually. (3) Master Data Management included — most ESBs don't include MDM. You'd need to purchase a separate MDM product (Informatica, IBM) at $200K+/year. Civic Integration Hub includes MDM as a core module.
Native integrations with all Civic Suite modules (Property Tax, Utility Billing, CRM, ERP, Permits & Licensing, Asset Management, Recreation, Elections). Pre-built connectors for provincial systems (MPAC, Teranet, ServiceOntario), federal services (Canada Post AddressComplete), financial institutions (all major Canadian banks via CPA Standard 005), and GIS platforms (Esri ArcGIS, QGIS). CDC bridges for legacy systems (AS/400, Oracle, SQL Server, Access) without modifying the source system. The Connector SDK enables building custom connectors for any additional system.
No. The Integration Hub is specifically designed to work with your existing systems — including legacy systems. Change Data Capture (CDC) bridges enable integration with legacy databases (AS/400, Oracle, mainframe) without any modification to the source system. The CDC connector reads the database change log, captures inserts, updates, and deletes, and publishes them to the event bus. Your legacy system continues operating exactly as before. The Hub connects what you have today and provides a migration path as you modernize.
Master Data Management (MDM) creates a single, authoritative 'golden record' for each citizen, property, and business entity across all connected systems. Without MDM, 'Jane Smith' might exist as 'J. Smith' in tax, 'Jane A. Smith' in utility, and 'Smith, Jane' in permits — with different addresses because she moved and only updated two systems. MDM uses probabilistic matching to identify that these are the same person, merges them into one golden record, and synchronizes all connected systems. This eliminates cross-system inconsistencies, reduces manual data entry by 80%, and enables cross-system reporting that was previously impossible.
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