Gareth Bezett

I am on about the third attempt so far to setup EDI ordering between a client and one of their main suppliers. It's amazing what I have learnt along the way. Encryption, digital signing and other stuff that I knew existed, but had hoped to never confront are now front and centre in my consiousness.

I have had to deal with two different aspects to the project: transportation protocols and the formatting of the payload. There is a standard (that may not be the right word) called AS2 which sends stuff via http. There is another standard (definitely a standard, its from ANSI) which is known as X12 that specifies how data should look. These two standards allow different software and hardware platforms to talk to each other in a common language.

It will be interesting to see if this attempt comes to fruition.