Say a very large company uses EDI and its largest trading partners also use it. Say also that this company has many thousands of other, smaller partners who do not use EDI.
The large company stands to benefit if it can communicate with all or most of these many smaller partners using EDI. But many of the smaller companies will not be able to install EDI, and some of them are entirely paper-based. Are there any extremely light and inexpensive ways of installing an EDI end-point in these small companies? Something that can keep track of what's been sent, send responses, print stuff, etc. -- in other words present an EDI interface back to the larger partner. Hopefully this type of mini-EDI product would use scripting, etc. to allow the smaller company to evolve in its interactions with EDI partners.
Now that we can send EDI using XML (e.g. using BizTalk Server) this scenario will appear more frequently.
I'm new to EDI, and wondered if anyone out there has dealt with this problem.
Thanks.
