Re: EDIINT AS2 Question was RE: ARGH! Please make it STOP!

You are correct - when either side of a trading partner relationship has a 
transaction to send, they send it.  There is no mechanism for holding a 
transaction until contacted by the partner.  AS2 uses HTTP and SSL and 
encapsulates the data, which is typically standard EDI formatted data.

If you do EDI now, chances are very good that one of your trading partners will 
require you to go AS2 soon.  The main attraction is getting rid of VAN and 
dial-up costs.  Wal-Mart is making us go - we are cogitating on the appropriate 
solution.  We have done some testing with W-M using a trial PC solution; what 
we did is enable the specific port required from the specific address specified 
by Wal-Mart on the firewall.

If you do AS2, your network police are going to have to cave.  If they are not 
smart enough to securely configure this application, your company needs new 
network police.  In a general sense, "zero tolerance" really means "I am too 
lazy to look case-by-case and exercise some judgment". This particular zero 
tolerance policy is not very bright, and probably already violated by the mail 
server listening on SMTP.

Take care.


------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 11:39:10 -0700
From: "Hatzenbeler, Tim" <thatzenbeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: EDIINT AS2 Question was RE: ARGH!  Please make it STOP!

I was wondering, if anybody has experience with AS2,  I have been asked to
research it's viablity for our company, but it has one glaring problem I
can't get around.  AS2 seems to be a push only service, so if I push data to
our Trading Partner, I must then break the connection and wait for a reply,
(here is the problem)  our network police has a zero toloerance when it
comes to listening ports.  So I can't seem to figure out if I can make this
technology work for us.  I was wondering if anyone else has implemented AS2,
and how did they make their network police happy?

Tim



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