Overview Part II - Communication

Communicating... sending and receiving electronic messages... ummm... sounds like email!

We all understand email and are familiar and comfortable with the concept of email. Then why is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) more complicated? Well I think part of the answer lies in its age. EDI has been in wide spread use in business longer than email. The other reason may be down to security concerns, but it is certainly technically possible to set up an EDI system using email.

Imagine we didn't have the internet (it wasn't that long ago!). To communicate with another computer I needed either a dedicated cable, or a modem, or a network. If I have 100 trading partners (there's that phrase again) that is a lot of cables or telephoning. So the obvious answer is a network all users communicated with, that forwarded all our messages onwards. Like an out-going postbox and an in-comming mailbox. Yes, this is just like internet email.

It seems so obvious to us now, but back then TCP/IP was not the dominant networking technology. So third party businesses sprung up to operate these networks (called VANs - Value Added Networks). Unfortunately, just like EDI standards, there are lots of EDI networks. So if your customer (eh... I mean trading partner) used a particular one, you were more or less forced to use it, though networks could have their own mailboxs on other networks, to provide network to network communication.

But wait a minute. You still have to communicate with the VAN. Good VANs will offer a choice of ways - modem dial up, secure FTP (File Transfer Protocol), web pages (HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol). These days some of these middle-men, third parties, are really just a URL and a server.

Part I, Part III