Last week I was taking the slow and casual route toward the Southland, and had pulled into one of my long time favorite roadside eateries. I was just finishing up my slice of Mother Mabry's apple pie and a cup of coffee when I got a call from one of my clients asking to know what his trading partner ID was. After asking him just a couple of questions, I learned that he had received a survey from one of his customers, Gander Mountain, who was asking him about using web forms. Interesting question, I thought, but why would Gander Mountain even care? Is Gander Mountain getting into the EDI service provider business? Read more...

Some organizations (especially Fortune 1000 companies) chose to use enterprise level job scheduling software (aka Workload automation) for all IT jobs not just EDI. The enterprise scheduling software is maintained by the IT operations team and includes dozens of other jobs in addition to EDI such as mainframe jobs, SAP jobs, PeopleSoft jobs and etc. The scheduling software has adapters installed on the servers where the jobs are actually executed and they run as a service. Then the operations team uses a client version of the software to set up the jobs and monitor them. Some examples of popular job schedulers (in no particular order) are Control-M, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, BMC CONTROL-M, and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler. There are a also half-a-dozen open-source job schedulers out there as well.