Today, there seems to be a standard for everyone which may appear to be defeating the point of having a standard. However, standards like everything else in the computer industry have evolved and as advances are made new ones appear often replicating the purpose of previous ones. This leads to the usual stoushes over which one is superior but often these are driven by what one is most comfortable with.

There is always a good reason “up close” for a standard but seen from a distance they can appear like a jungle to the uninitiated.

At eVision, our philosophy is to work with all standards since it is our job to enable organisations and trading partners to exchange electronic documents and messages securely and efficiently in the manner best for them. This is why our MXC solution is used by service providers to host the business transactions of their customers.

Over the years many standards have been produced to address the requirements of exchanging messages. In the early days, EDIFACT and ANSI X.12 over an X.400 protocol were the standards of choice. Now, it is XML over one of the internet transport protocols or via a web service.

However, there have been additional challenges of working on a public network like the internet as opposed to a private network like those of the VAN (Value Added Network) service providers.

And yes, you guessed it; these challenges have been addressed by more standards such as ebXML’s MSS (Message Standard Specification), RosettaNet’s RNIF and web services. For example, they include ways to authenticate entities; to encrypt content; to guarantee delivery (reliable messaging) and to confirm the receipt of electronic messages in the form they were sent (referred to as non-repudiation).

Of course, with visionaries eyeing the holy grail of automating the business processes of organisations there have been more standards developed. These include the most recent version of ebXML’s Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) and the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL).

Every now and then a standard comes along which helps everyone and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) standard is one of those. Its purpose is to provide a standard notation for representing a business process. Its major benefit is that it enables business people and modellers to define their requirements without getting overly technical but it is sufficiently detailed to enable technical people to derive their requirements. In fact, it should be possible to automatically generate a BPSS or WS-BPEL definition from a BPMN diagram.

At eVision, we have been working with these standards too so you can expect to see a new business process capability rolled out in MXC shortly. A user will be able to draw a BPMN diagram associating business transactions into a process for hosting on MXC. There will be more on this topic shortly.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 10:15 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.