A Connection Manager (CM) is an agent service, or a process associated to the Workgroup Server (WGS) host, facilitating connection to the middleware layer between the WGS and middleware software, for example, IBM MQ, TIBCO EMS, Apache Kafka, Solace, and RabbitMQ. The CM maintains the configuration setup to establish communication between the WGS and the middleware layer. The CM can be started as a service/process or executed directly from an interactive operating system console with specific parameters.