RE: What do people really expect from ebXML? - CoreComponents-Transactions!

[Bob Haugen <linkage@interaccess.com>]

David Lyon:
>Sure. It might be a very challenging intellectual activity to do the Business Process
>modelling, but I'm very sure that most Managers worldwide in SMEs wll tell you that 
>they know pretty much know all there is to know about a "Purchase Order" or an 
>"Invoice".

Have you concluded that business process modeling is something very
complicated and that you need to do it?  I will try to demystify.

First, ebXML is a bunch of specifications, each of which can be used
somewhat independently of the others, for example, you could use
ebXML transport & routing with EDIFACT payloads and ignore everything
else in ebXML.

But back to business processes:  the simplest level of ebXML business
processes is called Business Transactions, and they are transactions
in something like the transaction processing monitor sense: they
either succeed or fail in total.  What that means is that if you send
a purchase order request, you will know for sure that it arrived at its
destination and was accepted, or failed either for technical or 
business reasons (and know which reason).  In traditional EDI, 
Value Added Networks (VANs) provided reliability and accountability.  
On the Internet, they don't. 

Plus there has been a lot of work since VAN days on how to 
conduct legally-binding transactions electronically.  For example,
RosettaNet.  But RosettaNet software is expensive.

The ebXML Business Transaction model attempts to capture
all of this prior work.  The business transaction patterns have
already been modeled, all you need to do is pick one and maybe
override some default timing and security parameters.  If you do,
you will have the current best practices on how to do legally-binding
electronic business.  

There are some more elaborate possibilities in ebXML business
process modeling, but the Business Transaction level is basic
and should be simple to use. 

(By the way, this is a different meaning of "transaction" than what
you were using, which seemed to mean what ebXML calls
"Business Document".  I'm not trying to be pedantic, but transaction
is one of those unfortunately overloaded words that we always
get in a muddle about.  Sometimes I wish ebXML had chosen
something different, like "Lurgle".) 

Hope that communicated...

-Bob Haugen