A lot of this depends on if you are trading with customers or vendors. If you are the customer, then obviously you have quite a bit of leverage. Sometimes change can be painful.
AS2 is a good solution, but not the "free on the internet" solution you may be looking for. AS2 for 75 partners will get expensive for the software as well as the implementation. Obviously the type of data (ie banking or HIPAA) might mandate you go with some sort of secure communication protocol. We have a customer who also was using easylink via a dial up BSC connection. They had about 60 proprietary EDI partners (internal app) and 15 real EDI partners. We ended up building them an FTP server that only served to communicate with partners and ditched the easylink VAN all together. If was a much cheaper solution that supporting AS2, and frankly, this customer did not need the security of AS2. It has been a very cost effective solution, and we maintain it for the customer at a fraction of these VAN charges they were spending. cjg Carl J. Galgano EDI Consulting Services, Inc. 770-422-2995 www.ediconsulting.com 600 Kennesaw Avenue Suite 400 Marietta, GA 30060 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of w_cohen99 Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 10:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [EDI-L] Reducing/eliminating our EDI VAN We are a mid-size company and use EDI through Easylink (VAN). We have 75 trading partners of which some of them are EDI brokers and some of them themselves use other VANs and we pay about $1k per month for our low-volume communications costs (~3600kc). We [still] use a dial-up modem while connecting to Easylink. We want to get into the 21st century and get away from using the modem so we are looking at other options (internet/web-based, ftp, http, AS1, AS2, etc). Ideally we'd like to try and eliminate the VAN communication costs from the picture. What we've done so far is look at other VANs that allow us to get off the modem and go through an internet protocol (via web browser) for communicating. My question is how do I go about researching other alternatives such as using AS2? DO I need to poll all of my trading partners to see if they can handle AS2? If some can handle AS2 and some can't then what are my options? How can we [slowly] get off of teh EDI VAN? Thaks for any assistance. Walter ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
