Setting up
Transports
How the document physically travels. Three kinds, one record per partner, and the parts that expire are watched for you.
A transport is the connection to one partner. It says which protocol, which address, and which identifiers the two of you use to recognise each other. The agreements say what to send; the transport says how.
The three kinds
| Type | What it is | You will meet it |
|---|---|---|
| AS2 | A direct connection between two companies over HTTP, signed and encrypted, with a signed receipt coming back | Grocery, retail, most established EDIFACT relationships |
| AS4 | The newer equivalent, and the one the public networks are built on | Peppol and NemHandel, and increasingly the public sector |
| SFTP | Files in directories on a server, picked up and dropped off | Partners without an EDI stack, and internal integrations |
AS2
AS2 is point to point. You need the partner's URL, the AS2 identifier each side answers to, and their certificate. You upload their certificate on the transport; ours is handled on our side.
Compression is a switch, because some partners insist on it and some cannot read it. If a partner complains that your messages are unreadable and the certificate is right, this is usually the reason.
AS4
AS4 comes in two shapes, and the difference matters more than it looks.
- Over a network. Choose Peppol or NemHandel, and you do not enter an address at all. The network has a directory, and the partner is found in it from their identifier. The certificate is the network's business, not yours.
- Direct. No network, so you enter the partner's endpoint and their certificate yourself, the way you would for AS2.
The profile says which dialect of AS4 the far end speaks: the plain standard, one of the two eDelivery profiles, or the gas-industry one. Ask the partner; guessing produces a message that is delivered and then refused.
SFTP
Host, port, user and password, plus the identifiers each side is known by. It is the simplest of the three and the one with the most ways to be quietly wrong: a partner who renames files, a key that was rotated without telling anyone, a server that stopped answering at the weekend. When SFTP goes quiet, the answer is usually on their side rather than in the record.
Certificates
Certificates expire, and a certificate that expires on a Friday is an outage on a Monday. The module keeps a status per partner and shows what is approaching its end, so the renewal is a task rather than a surprise.
Look at the certificate list in the operations workspace at least as often as you look at anything else. It is the one part of EDI that fails on a date rather than for a reason.
One transport, many agreements
A partner has one transport and as many agreements as you exchange documents. Changing the transport changes how every document to that partner travels, in both directions, at once. That is usually what you want, and it is worth knowing before you edit one on a Friday afternoon.