Basic Interactions

Basic Interactions

Consider the following two interactions:

  • Choosing products or services. Trading partners, and ultimately customers, need to know what products or services a supplier is selling. They need enough detail about the products or services and their prices to make a purchasing decision. Product catalogs are a common mechanism through which this information can be communicated. Traditionally, product catalogs tend to be paper-based and distributed through postal mail. Now, with the Internet, product catalogs can be completely electronic, and viewed on a Web site or other equivalent technology.
  • Placing orders. Once the customer has determined which products to purchase, a mechanism is needed for communicating their choices from the trading partner to the supplier. Any additional business processing, such as approvals, needs to occur before those choices are forwarded to the supplier. If the choices are not approved, the order is rejected and is never sent to the supplier.

It is also important to understand that suppliers and trading partners use different types of software for these interactions. Customers interact with buyer applications, also known as procurement applications, hosted by a trading partner. The trading partner might be the company that the customer works for, or it might be an electronic marketplace that specializes in hosting a buyer application. For more information about buyer applications, see the section "The Trading Partner's Buyer Application" later in this chapter. Note that Microsoft does not currently sell procurement applications for trading partners.

Suppliers require software that will interact with procurement applications, by providing electronic product catalogs to the procurement application and accepting purchase orders from the procurement application. Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, bound together with AFS, provide this software functionality.

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Microsoft Corporation - Microsoft. Net Server Solutions for the Enterprise
Microsoft .NET Server Solutions for the Enterprise
ISBN: 0735615691
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 483

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