In this section of the manual you will find a variety of articles that discuss the Channel Management Framework which is a new and important feature for Jomres that's is being added in 2020.

What is the Jomres Channel Management Framework?

 

The Channel Management Framework (CMF) is a set of plugins for Jomres that are designed to allow outside systems to securely connect to Jomres installations. These systems connect to Jomres for the purpose of sharing properties, availability, pricing and more.

What is the purpose of the CMF?

The CMF has several goals, some short-term, some longer term.

• The short-term goal of the CMF is to allow Jomres to connect to a variety of different channel managers, giving you and your property managers the choice of which channels they can use. For portal providers, this gives you a big advantage over your competitors. Many self-hosted booking engines don't offer connectivity to channel managers, and if they do, they only offer connectivity to one channel, which limits your potential clients to only those who already use that channel manager, or worse, just their own. This locks you into their service for years and reduces the choices you can make with respect to your business. 
• The long-term goal of the CMF is to liberalise connectivity. In today's world property managers lose a signficant amount of their income to OTAs (Online Travel Agencies such as booking.com, expedia) and Channel Managers (which synchronise bookings between different OTAs) themselves. Building connectivity functionality into Jomres, which is Open Source, allows anybody with the relevant skills (and authority) to connect to Jomres installations and share properties, availability and pricing between sites.
• A further long-term goal is to allow you to share your properties between your Jomres installations at no extra cost. This allows you to build complete networks of Jomres based sites, all connected and synchronised without needing to pay extra to different OTAs.

Who controls the connectivity?

You do.

Agents who want to connect to your installation are registered on your sites as property managers, they then create API keys and import properties to your site.

The purpose here is to give you complete control over your data, allowing you to share bookings and properties across multiple sites. This isn't an attempt by me to cash-grab, instead it's a disruptive plan to give the travel industry's monopolies with their deep investor's pockets, a run for their money.