Mark Wilson I am the creator of TopXML. I am available for international and local (Australia) contracts. I am a Solution Architect/Business Analyst. I have worked in IT in several countries (NZ, Australia, South Africa, UK) building and training teams for government and very large non-governmental organizations. I am ex-Microsoft Consulting Services. I wrote the first book on Microsoft XML published in 2000 called XML Programming with VB and ASP. Most recently I have been building tools for the SEO industry. Ask me for a 37 point SEO health-checkup for your website.
Let’s take it from the top. B2B is nothing fancy. Businesses have
been communicating with other Businesses since the beginning of time.
What has changed is the technology which carries the communication - from smoke
plumes to pigeons to mail to fax to EDI … and now to communication via the
internet (B2B). Communication via the internet (which is what B2B is when you
look under the skin) is simply the latest souped up communications technology to
come along ... allowing for the communications be more frequent, rapid and
accurate. That’s all.
Ok, enabling more frequent, rapid and accurate communication is quite a big
deal. Actually it is a major deal.
A quick comparison of B2B and EDI is in order before delving further into
B2B. Just like B2B, EDI allowed electronic communication between businesses.
There are two major differences, however:
EDI is batch while B2B is real-time, and
EDI was dedicated point to point (which means that if a business wanted
to use EDI to communicate with a new business partner it was a big
hassle), while B2B (using XML) allows any business to communicate with any
other business.
XML is a way to enable data to have structure. Text documents have no
structure... in other words, An XML file is an old fashioned flat text file
(which contains the data) which also references another flat text file (called
a schema) which contains the structure of that data. If everyone adopts the
same structure for (say) a Purchase Order, then you can zing your flat text
XML file containing your Purchase Order data to someone else who – using the
same schema – can read your Purchase Order easily. Marvellous! Only problem
is that we have succeeded in coming up with multiple schemas … or multiple
versions of descriptions for a Purchase Order. While predictable (to the
defeatists out there anyway), it is a real pity that the schemas have not been
unified yet. Perhaps they will be … and in the meantime there is software
available that will map the various schemas to each other thus allowing free
and un-fettered communication.
It might sound like a small thing, but being able to recognize and
automatically use a flat file that another business sends to you is a major step
forward. We think we are pretty clever with computer systems today, but there is
almost always some sort of manual intervention involved, and as we know, manual
intervention leads to a) higher costs and b) time delays and c) errors.
Ok, so B2B allows for communication which is more frequent (real-time), rapid
(real-time) and accurate (automated). The question is “what are companies
doing to take advantage of it”?
