Hello.
In this video I’ll describe how ZEDI can be used as an eAdaptor gateway and why this is likely to be useful to your business. I’ll also run through the steps involved in setting it up.
First, I’ll talk about eAdaptor generally and why gateway functionality is of value.
I’ll then show you what’s involved in making it work in practice.
So, under what circumstances would a gateway be useful?
This is a fairly typical eAdaptor setup. We have CargoWise itself, using its eAdaptor to securely exchange files with another system.
That “other” system might be a CargoWise system belonging to one of your customers or suppliers, or it could be an EDI server or any number of other types of business system.
A problem occurs when you have more than one of them.
Say the setup needed to look like this:
The problem is that CargoWise has a single place in the registry where the URL and logon credentials for an external eAdaptor can be specified.
Each of the external eAdaptors has a different URL, and they are likely to expect different passwords as well.
This means that at any one time we could have one outbound connection like this:
Or this….
Or this…
But never this:
There’s a different issue with inbound connections.
Multiple external eAdaptors are able to connect into your eAdaptor and submit transactions for processing, but they all have to use the same user ID and password.
This is because there is a single place in the registry where the user ID and password can be specified.
Having multiple external organisations all knowing the user ID and password for your eAdaptor is a potential security risk.
If you were to stop trading with supplier 1, then you would naturally want to change the eAdaptor password. You would need to contact the owners of the other three eAdaptors and schedule a time for the password change.
With only three of them this would be inconvenient, but possible. It would become a far greater challenge is there was a large number of external eAdaptors to coordinate.
Ideally, each of these external organisations would have a different user ID and password, which is where using ZEDI as an eAdaptor gateway comes in.
In this setup, each external eAdaptor has a different user ID and password. These are used to logon to ZEDI’s eAdaptor and send transactions.
ZEDI can then forward the transactions to your CargoWise environment using the “real” user ID and password.
Adding a new eAdaptor is simply a matter of creating a login for it within ZEDI. Similarly, removing an eAdaptor would be done by deleting that login from ZEDI.
At no time do any of the external eAdaptors need to know the real user ID and password for your CargoWise environment, only ZEDI needs to know that.
For outbound transactions, the gateway works like this.
Your CargoWise system is configured to send all transactions to your ZEDI server using a password that’s only known to your business.
ZEDI then performs a metadata extract action to answer the question “where does this transaction need to go?”
It then delivers each transaction to the appropriate external eAdaptor using different logon credentials for each.
So the benefits of this approach are that it allows your business to exchange transactions with any number of external eAdaptors.
You can also receive transactions from any number of eAdapters without compromising system security.
Thank you for watching. To find out more, please contact ZirconBlue at info@zirconblue.com or visit our web site.