Re: [ebxml-dev] ebxml virtual appliance

["Stephen Green" <stephengreenubl@gmail.com>]

Just curious Roger: Does it use IM at all and do you think
it important to major on a small variety of transport options
(IM and/or FTP for example) to increase likelihood of matching
capabilities between applications? Might this correspond to
a need for maximum defaulting (initially with possibilities for
customisation as secondary) to get a happy 'out-of-the-box'
'serendipity factor' (acknowledgments to GKH for the latter
phrase for it)? These factors seem important for Bryan's
topic (unless I've * completely * missed the point of it perhaps).

Thanks

Stephen Green

On 19/03/07, Roger Bass <Roger@traxian.com> wrote:
> Bryan, Matt, David et al,
>
> I heartily agree with Matt's comments about ease of use being essential.
> David and I are both involved offline in a project around Traxian's
> offering, which I'd described to him as "Skype for B2B" (not that we'll
> be trademarking that, obviously <g>). Traxian is a lightweight, uniform
> client for integrating B2B seamlessly with popular applications like
> QuickBooks - and which leverages hosted services to handle the
> variability in different partner connections (i.e. format/protocol
> translation, data aligment etc).
>
> As some real-world background... our first product was a (fairly) pure
> client-to-client model. Worked well in the lab... but in practice the
> amount of tweaking and updating required on the client for each
> end-to-end use case led to poor customer experiences and poor
> supportability. Pure P2P implementations here can work fine
> "out-of-the-box" where requirements and interfaces are well-defined and
> stable - but we're a long way from that in the real world, especially
> when SMB application integration (vs just file delivery) is a
> requirement. Approaches that start with message delivery, and see app
> integration as a "plug-in" will not work, in my view.
>
> To your original question Bryan: the key requirement, I'd suggest, is
> seamless end-to-end integration. Any technologies or standards that
> relate to internal/B2B connections are fairly irrelevant from a user's
> perspective, though they may matter for other reasons.
>
> Regards,
> Roger
>
>