The Inovis Blog

Inovis actively supports regional user groups and 2008 represents a new opportunity to work with NEECOM, a long standing user group which many of our customers participate in and Inovis has supported for many years. NEECOM is the New England Electronic Commerce User’s Group for B2B and EDI professional and one of the largest in the nation. NEECOM is a great venue to meet others and see how they are tackling the challenges of operating complex supply chains which are compliant to their trading partner requirements and provide increased efficiency for their businesses.

Next week is NEECOM’s spring event and Inovis is looking forward to meeting our customers, their trading partners and the industry leaders who will be at the event to ensure we can bring back the lessons learned and share them our user community.

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Being a software developer who tries to stay ahead of the bleeding edge (presumably caused by paper cuts), I’m always keeping my eyes peeled and an ear to the ground to keep up with the latest of the latest trends. Admittedly, it leads to bad posture (common to many a software developer), but it has served me well over my something-mumble-something years in the industry. A lot of what I hear, of course, is rumor and a large percentage of that is quite spurious and not worth repeating. However, I’ve recently heard not one, not two, but three different rumors all of which seemed very exciting to me (and at my age, that’s saying something—I’m not sure what, but something).

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The Drummond Group has confirmed in a recent announcement that AS3 is the recommended data exchange method for large files.  Not only does AS3 support large files, but secures the payload and transmission of the data over a secure session for B2B content exchange.    Inovis provides secure file transport with certified support of As3 to ensure we can address our customers needs for payroll files, HIPAA data and managed file transfer requirements and are part of the certified solutions for AS3 large files.  The increasing file sizes and goals of businesses to improve the security at the edge of the enterprise is a growin trend in the marketplace, as evidenced in the Drummond announcement. 

Drummond is not the only organization supporting or recommending EDI-INT for secure transaction management, so is X12.  X12 released a recommended implementation guide for securing  and exchanging data between organizations via EDI-INT. 

What is AS3?  AS3 is a secure version of FTP which provides for certificate based encryption and end point management.    AS3 also provides for non-repudiation or confirmation of reciept of the file by a given end point or trading partner.  To get detailed information on the IETF standard you can get more information online @ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4823.txt about how you can use standards based communication, instead of legacy FTP scripts and propriatary options. 

If you’ve seen my past posts, you know I’ve spent a lot of time on the discussion of EDI vs. XML. In part it’s been a quest to understand why trends seem to flow as they do. Back in December, in response to a post I wrote, Tom Reynolds said as part of his comment, “Let’s admit that EDI is humanly unreadable (this is its real weakness) and XML’s great strength is that it is humanly readable.”

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable statement, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less I agree. While I agree EDI is pretty much unreadable, I would suggest that is not a weakness since EDI was never intended to be read by humans…the whole point was to transfer data between computers without any human intervention. As it turns out, its true weakness is that it is not used consistently by all and it is hard to troubleshoot because it’s so compact and hard to read.
Therefore, it follows that the advantage to XML (in a comparable computer-to-computer-without-human-intervention scenario) is that it would be easier to troubleshoot because the data is so readable.

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