Solution Architect's Year in Review: Bridging Field Operations and Enterprise Systems

2025 has been a year of complex integrations, creative problem-solving, and pushing the boundaries of what TrueContext can do for enterprise customers. As a Solutions Architect, I've had the opportunity to work on some genuinely challenging implementations, and I wanted to share a few highlights and lessons learned along the way.

The Maximo Deep Dive

If there's one theme that defined my year, it's IBM Maximo. I spent a significant portion of 2025 elbow-deep in OSLC queries, FreeMarker templates, and work order workflows, primarily for Coterra Energy's oil and gas operations.

The Coterra project pushed me to build out a comprehensive work order management system that handles everything from creating new work orders to updating inspection results, managing follow-up tickets, and syncing labor transactions. One of the more interesting challenges was wrestling with Maximo's pagination. Getting that /responseInfo/nextPage/href node working correctly across 20+ data sources took some trial and error.

For anyone doing similar work, a few hard-won lessons:

• URL encoding matters more than you think. I lost count of how many times an unencoded asterisk in an OSLC where clause caused a BMXAA8744E parsing error. When in doubt, encode everything. * becomes %2A, = becomes %3D.
• The lean=1 parameter is your friend. It strips out metadata cruft and makes responses much easier to work with in FreeMarker templates.
• OSLC's or operator can be finicky. Some Maximo versions want uppercase OR, some want parentheses around compound conditions. Test in isolation before building complex queries.

FreeMarker: Still My Favorite Kind of Puzzle

There's something deeply satisfying about getting a complex FreeMarker template to produce clean JSON. This year I built templates for work order creation, inspection result updates, labor transactions, and incident reporting. The trickiest part is usually handling nested data structures from repeatable sections. You need to make sure you're iterating at the right level and handling nulls gracefully.

One template that gave me fits involved dynamically generating inspection field results from form sections. The breakthrough was realizing I needed to build an intermediate array of valid answers before iterating, rather than trying to do everything in a single pass:

<#assign validAnswers = []>
<#list section.answers?values as answer>
    <#if answer.values?has_content>
        <#assign validAnswers = validAnswers + [answer]>
    </#if>
</#list>

Sometimes the simplest patterns are the ones that take the longest to find.

Salesforce Field Service: The Other Side of the Coin

While Maximo dominated my calendar, I also spent time building out Salesforce Field Service integrations and demo content. The deep link workflow (launching TrueContext from a Service Appointment, prepopulating form data, then pushing results back to Salesforce) remains one of the cleanest bidirectional integrations we offer.

I put together a demo script and walkthrough that shows how a technician moves seamlessly from Salesforce to TrueContext and back. The key insight for customers is that this isn't just about eliminating double data entry. It's about giving field techs complete context before they even start their work, then ensuring that context flows back to dispatchers and managers in real time.

Building for the Future: Documentation Agents and Automation

Toward the end of the year, I started thinking about how to work smarter on recurring tasks. I mapped out what a "TrueContext Integration Implementation Assistant" might look like. The idea was an AI agent that could generate FreeMarker templates from natural language descriptions, help construct OSLC queries, and convert technical notes into client-ready documentation.

I also explored middleware solutions like n8n for scenarios where TrueContext's native destinations need a little extra help. Things like merging PDFs, handling multi-file uploads to Monday.com, or orchestrating complex workflows that span multiple systems.

Looking Ahead

2025 taught me that enterprise integrations are never really "done." There's always another edge case, another system quirk, another customer with a workflow that doesn't quite fit the standard patterns. But that's also what keeps the work interesting.

For 2026, I'm excited to go deeper on middleware automation, continue refining our Maximo and Salesforce integration patterns, and hopefully find more opportunities to share what works (and what doesn't) with the TrueContext community.

If you're working on similar challenges, or just want to commiserate about OSLC query syntax, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment below or find me in the community forums.

Here's to another year of connecting the field to the enterprise.

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Ian Chamberlain
Solutions Architect
TrueContext
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