EDI – An essential tool for communicating between organizations!
For decades, EDI has served as one of the most popular standards for exchanging business documents and communicating between organizations.
With its speed and ability to minimize human involvement in the document exchange process, EDI has emerged as an essential tool for business-to-business transactions across organizations.
BizTalk Server integration platform
The challenge many organizations face is the often-daunting task of replacing their existing B2B platform in order to support EDI interfaces. Microsoft can make life easier with BizTalk Server integrated platform.
BizTalk Server has been Microsoft’s Integration tool since its introduction in 2000. From the start, it was clear that BizTalk would play an integral role in the B2B process. EDI functionality, however, was not natively built within the first several iterations of the product. Instead, EDI functionality was built within adapters and accelerators, usually by third-party organizations such as Covast.
BizTalk Server built-in EDI functionality support is now native to the current BizTalk platforms and includes the following support functionality features:
- The pipelines, orchestrations, and schemas essential for processing EDI transactions.
- The Receive Pipeline, which is able to split EDI batches, parse EDI documents, convert EDI files into XML files, perform EDI and XSD validation, and perform HIPAA X12 sub-document splitting.
- The Send Pipeline converts XML files into X12 or EDIFACT documents, serializes EDI encoded files, and performs EDI and XSD validation.
- The Batching Orchestration allows for batching of EDI interchanges and sets the necessary properties for sending the transactions.
- The Trading Partner Management interface allows an organization to set processing properties for trading partners doing EDI interchange.
- The Status Reporting Interface allows for detailed status reports of all the EDI interchanges being transacted.
- The Design Time Tools within Visual Studio allow an organization to create an instance, validate that instance, validate a schema, and test and validate a map.
Microsoft has gone to great lengths to build native EDI functionality within their BizTalk product. The native EDI tools, together with the built-in BizTalk Server features, allow for a powerful and all-encompassing product entrusted to handle an organizations B2B processes.
With the help of TwoConnect’s talented Microsoft Certified BizTalk professionals experienced in implementing and developing complete B2B EDI solutions, your organization can increase its efficiency, speed, and accuracy for all B2B transactions.
Contact Us for a FREE Consultation on EDI Integration.
