Message From KO/Office

[mark.hughes@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Dale,
as a business user of both EDI and E-mail with our Trading Partners,
we will not use one data encryption method for EDI (X12.58) and a
different one for E-mail.
And we will progess to sending all our EDI as e-mail to e-mail
addresses as well; we have no interest in sending over a proprietary
VAN using proprietary addressing (some funny characters in the ISA
or UNB segments) when we can send it on the Internet.
We have 100,000 business customers here in Australia, and hundreds
of thousands more in other countries.  Many of them are small
organisations (1-10 people total, no IS department).  The idea that
they are going to use encryption method A for their email and method
B for EDI is, to put it kindly, a poor joke.  Its the sort of
solution that big companies with lots of IS resources come up with.
EDI is just e-mail.  Sure, its application to application rather
than person to person, but its just e-mail.  And we need a simple
encryption method that is consistent so our customers' off the shelf
e-mail package can receive a person to person or application to
application message and decrypt it.
So encryption of just part of the EDI message is a solution with no
long term future for 99.9 percent of businesses around the world.
If that means that all the good work you did on X12.58 while at
Sterling is a complete waste of time and effort, then all I can do
is commiserate, and admit that in the past I too have wasted time on
proprietary EDI solutions that will never be implemented.
Regards Mark



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*  Message From : HUGHES, MARK          *
*  Location     : AUSTRALIA-CCA HDQ     *
*  KOMAIL ID    : N17503  (CCAMCQN1)    *
*  Date and Time: 05/22/96  17:04:35    *
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