An Altova customer OEMs MapForce and XMLSpy to use as the
mapping and XML development components of their Microsoft®
Sharepoint®-based EDI management application.
Overview
HubKey is a technology company offering e-commercesolutions and services to small and mid-sized organi-zations. Their flagship product, ILXA, is a hostedapplication that uses the document and workflow man-agement capabilities of Microsoft Sharepoint, combinedwith the power and flexibility of Altova MapForce andXMLSpy, to deliver a scalable, end-to-end, business-to-business (B2B) solution for outsourced EDI.
ILXA builds an intuitive user interface andsuperior content management controls andfunctionality around e-commerce/EDI datasources, giving customers the freedom toquickly and accurately process electronictransactions without the need for costly soft-ware and hardware systems.
The HubKey team wanted to build a comprehensiveEDI management and translation system that wouldgive their clients the ability to track their EDI trans-actions across a customized workflow and alsotransform the messages into virtually any other dataformat.
EDI systems are required to handle a large andconstant flow of transactions going back and forthbetween trading partners. While the actual volume of the data being transmitted is often very small, theamount of individual communications can be over-whelming. HubKey ILXA contains the chaos of EDIautomation by giving organizations the ability to view
and manage tasks and processes in batch-es or on-the-fly.
Recognizing an increasing demand for B2Bintegration systems that comply with bothEDI and XML, HubKey decided to build aplatform that had powerful support for bothdata formats and could generate applicationcode to automate these translations.Complex EDI-XML and XML-EDI mappingswould run behind-the-scenes, but userswould be able to access these mappings, aswell as the raw data, for quality assuranceand error fixing.
HubKey ILXA is a hosted e-commerce solution thatgives non-technical end users the ability to seam-lessly manage their EDI transactions without beingexposed to complex data syntax. To easily managethe document workflow, HubKey chose to build theirsystem on top of the Sharepoint platform, creating acustomizable .NET application with advanced func-tionality for a collaborative workflow environment.
The ILXA system draws upon the versatilityand quality control capabilities of XML, withEDI-XML conversion powered by AltovaMapForce. The end result is sophisticatedtranslation software combined with validationand workflow management capabilities, allin one easy-to-use system.
However, if changes or adjustments need to be made, ILXA customers are given the freedom toapply these in-house using the data maps saved in the SharePoint document library.
MapForce's intuitive graphical interface enables users to redraw connections, add functions from thefunction library, and apply filters to the mappings. Any saved changes cause compiled code to besaved back to the system and will affect ensuing automated transformations.
MapForce generates program code in Java, C++, and C#. HubKey opted to have code generated inC# to make it easily consumable by the Sharepoint platform.
Once the data has been translated, users can even launch XMLSpy to view and make changes directlyin the XML. The generated XML displays the original EDI format in the file for an easy comparison.
Using MapForce, ILXA can also be easily configured to convert data into other EDI specifications,databases, flat files, Microsoft Excel 2007, and Web services.
