On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, w_cohen99 wrote: > We are a mid-size company and use EDI through Easylink (VAN). We > have 75 trading partners of which some of them are EDI brokers and > some of them themselves use other VANs and we pay about $1k per > month for our low-volume communications costs (~3600kc). We [still] > use a dial-up modem while connecting to Easylink.
Dialup well and truly sucks. Ditching dialup for something IP based will make your life a bunch easier. > We want to get into the 21st century and get away from using the > modem so we are looking at other options (internet/web-based, ftp, > http, AS1, AS2, etc). > > Ideally we'd like to try and eliminate the VAN communication costs > from the picture. What we've done so far is look at other VANs that > allow us to get off the modem and go through an internet protocol > (via web browser) for communicating. > > My question is how do I go about researching other alternatives such > as using AS2? DO I need to poll all of my trading partners to see > if they can handle AS2? If some can handle AS2 and some can't then > what are my options? How can we [slowly] get off of teh EDI VAN? As a couple of other folks mentioned, shopping around for VANs can save quite a bit of money, and unless you're a 600lb gorilla, you probably will need to have some VAN capability anyway. Like Art, we use Softshare's VAN and have found it to be effective and low cost. I don't think you need to use their translator/comm software to use their VAN services, but I could be wrong about that. They post their prices at: <http://softshare.com/solutions/network/pricing/pricing_us.asp> BTW, my onservation is that all the VANs have different pricing algorthims mostly designed to make it hard to make head to head pricing comparisons. Good luck, Joe Matuscak Rohrer Corporation 717 Seville Road Wadsworth, Ohio 44281 (330)335-1541 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
