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Subject: FW: [ebxml-dev] ebXML starting point
Biela is looking for answers to several questions related to ebXML, and needs to have some of these items answered by the middle of next week. Can anyone help with providing some of the answers? Kathryn Breininger Boeing Library Services 425-965-0182 phone -----Original Message----- From: Wojtek Biela [mailto:wojtek@biela.pl] Sent: Friday, March 10, 2006 6:00 AM To: ebxml-dev@lists.ebxml.org Subject: [ebxml-dev] ebXML starting point Hello, Please point me to a resource/other forum if this forum isn't the place to ask those questions, but I failed to find this information on the web nor a more appropriate mailing list to ask. Myself: I'm a consultant/architect for a company what does retail sales through the web, an e-commerce company, a quite large one, there are about 2 million products and around 5-7 suppliers that supply them with products. My problem: Together we came to a point where we would like to embrace some more global format, some standard while communicating with our suppliers (B2B). There is a lot of communication going on. First of all we import various product details, updates, stock information, prices it happens daily, then we need to make orders for concrete products (when our customers order something on our site). I'm interested in standardizing the latter communication (the former too, but that's not so mission-critical for now). Up until now we've been placing those orders using various methods that each of our suppliers requested, one uses emails, other plain XML over HTTP, another one XML over FTP, some other just wants us to send the data over HTTP as GET parameters. We are now in the process of adding another supplier that uses EANCOM format over FTP for the ordering process. This leads us to quite a chaos and that's where some unifications ideas came in. My question: How should we proceed with this? I feel we need to develop things ourselves or use open-source frameworks. But how to approach this, I've read a dozen of articles on the web, and some specs from ebXML, and they are all very high level, none of them tell me how to start. The infrastructure problem: 1. Repository: as for now I'm not sure I understand the ebXML registry idea, do we need one at all? Can't we just manually send our technical contracts to suppliers we want to cooperate with? If we indeed need a repo then do we need it all the time or just for process of establishing valid channels to our suppliers? In the specs I've found that the repo is supposed to be something global, but I haven't found any that we ought to use, are we supposed to start our own locally? (ebxmlrr?) 2. MQ: I see we'll need the ebMQ, that's quite obvious, we'll use Hermes for sure, as I understand it both parties will have to implement some connectors to send messages to each other through Hermes, right? The message format problem: 1. I failed to find any spec/tutorial/example of how to express an order in ebXML, I found that we may use EANCOM and wrap it into a SOAP message, but I looked at ebXML in to run away from EANCOM in the first place, I found the EANCOM format more complicated than it should be in year 2006, I would rather see it in XML, but I didn't finds any specs on that. One of our supplier is using EANCOM but I don't want to force the others to use it. I would like to leave that as EANCOM wrapped into ebXML, but I'd like the new implementation of B2B interfaces that our suppliers will develop to use a more modern exchange format that would probably utilize XML. 2. I wanted to answer a few questions that by boss will ask me: is there in ebXML (like in EANCOM) any standardized way of ordering products (relates previous question), order response, invoice, credit note. Is there any standard way to manage internal stuff like item movement document (from one warehouse to another)? 3. what exactly need we implement ourselves (we do want to do it ourselves) to use ebXML other than installing Hermes, and maybe the ebmlrr repo? Or am I just missing something, I just found ebXML a few days ago so there is such a possibility. Please comment on this, point me to a resource that I missed or discuss this with me here, it's quite urgent as I am supposed to give a statement on this in the middle next week and I'm not quite sure I'm going to make the right assessment giving my current understanding of the subject I'm sorry for such an essay but I wanted to give the best situation overview to cut the discussion as short as possible,. Best regards and thank you all in advance Wojtek Biela
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