BizTalk How To for EDI

Question

I have been asked to create a system that accepts invoices from a company via AS2 EDI (and in the very soon future from many other companies). Through some research I came to the conclusion that I need a Biz Talk server to translate the company's invoice, convert it into XML, and then send that XML to a system we have for processing/validation. I am completely stumped as to how to make all of this work.

I've been learning what I can from Microsoft's BizTalk tutorials & videos, and a little bit from Pluralsight. But there are things that I just don't get at all. One of those things is customer interaction: how are they supposed to know what data to send to us (what document do I give them?), or how do I read this paper they sent me listing their message encryption. How does X12 or EDIFACT tie into all of this?

Do I have this right: I am supposed to create an X12 document with the fields (data) I need in order to process their invoice, and then I am supposed to send them this X12 document and say "here, send us this thing"? And then on my side, create the mapping from that X12 document, the orchestration for validation, and then return them a success or fail?

What resources can I use to learn how to answer these questions? Where do people even go to learn BizTalk Server when they're beginners?

I really appreciate any help from anyone. Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

A few things:

• You don't have to create the X12 transactions, BizTalk Server ships with schemas X12 and EDIFACT. You probably don't even need to customize them.
• In the beginning, you can probably rely on the Trading Partners to provide Companion Guides, especially if they have a more established EDI implementation.
• If they don't, and you need to create something, an spreadsheet is really all they need listing exactly which Segments and Elements need to be populated and how.

If you Bing the transaction you have to work with, "x12 850" for example, you will find other companies companion guides you can 'take inspiration' from.

Answer 2

AS2 is a standard for data transport security, EDI being an Electronic data interchange, so AS2 EDI means the standard for exchanging Electronic Documents securely.

EDIFACT is standard for electronic documents which are tagged flat files with a nested looping structure which dates back to when electronic documents needed to be as small as possible due to slow transmission speeds. If you are dealing with invoices you will probably dealing with EDIFACT INVOICE D96A or similar.

X12 is the Accredited Standards Committee X12, which is a standards organisation that set standards to be followed. It is a different format of document to EDIFACT (see EDI X12 vs UN/EDIFACT

I think you will find that various customers will use different electronic document formats and even if they use the same EDIFACT document format they will use it differently from each other (not all interpreting the standard the same way).
And not all of them will use AS2. So you have to make your solution extensible enough to be able to accept multiple different incoming formats & protocols and respond with different formats outgoing.

It sounds like you are a bit out of your depth here and what you are asking is not easy to start of with and the scope of your question is a bit overly broad for Stackoverflow.

Learning BizTalk on your own without being mentored would be very hard.
There are some useful books out there such us Packt's Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 Patterns and Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2010 Exam 70-595 Preparation that teach you the basics. There are also many blogs out there that are useful.

If you want your project to succeed however I would recommend hiring some people experienced in the EDI field.