The rise of Business-To-Business (or B2B) technology has been well documented recently in the press and on the United States stock exchanges. Here are ten things you need to know about the brave new world of XML.

1. What is the promise of XML?
   XML enables computer systems to sustain automated relationships with each other – to manipulate and move information around between themselves, by themselves..
   
2. What does this mean to businesses today?
   Within the company, separate systems can talk to each other and to systems such as SAP. Going outside the companies walls, XML allows your systems to be linked with those of your suppliers, customers and other partners, allowing the free flow of information throughout.
   
3. Can you give me an example?
   Let’s say you use SAP. Your supplier uses Oracle. Your customer uses some other legacy system. If you all use XML (properly), your customers’ system can pass their purchase order directly into your sales system, which converts it into a sales order automatically. Then, acting on instructions in your BOM, your system automatically spits out purchase orders and sends them to your supplier’s system. This backwards and forwards communication between systems goes on through the entire cycle (goods receipts, invoices, payments etc) with minimal human intervention.
   
4. Isn’t that what EDI promised too?
   Yes, it did, but it could not deliver. It could never have delivered what it promised because of it’s fundamental flaw.
   
5. And that is?
   EDI was implemented as a "point-to-point" solution – between two systems. This lack of standardization made it difficult and expensive to implement. It also made it nearly impossible to manage when one of the systems linked by EDI changed. Even small changes to data structures caused the entire chain to crash.
   
6. All right, so what is different about XML?
   With XML, systems need never know where the data is coming from. All systems know exactly what a purchase order, or a sales order look like. Standard schema’s have been developed for each primary piece of data in a company – and therefore systems need only understand the schema to be able to send and receive data from any other system. This is the magic of XML.
   
7. Ok. Sounds good. So, what exactly is XML?
   XML files are simply text files. No rocket-science there. The magic is in the standards that have been developed. Of course, there are currently a number of different standards organizations out there (duh!) but hopefully they’ll converge once the politics between the different groups are resolved.
   
8. What is XSL?
   The XML file holds the data. The XSL file holds the details on how to display the data. Thus these two files – XML and XSL – are usually communicated together. The one carries the data (XML file), and the other one carries the display layout (XSL file).
   
9. Is there hardware of middleware required?
   No additional hardware is required ... but you do need additional middleware. That is the subject of another article on Microsoft's BizTalk.
   
10. What is SAP doing with XML?
    XML is the technology which underlies mySAP.com. SAP have stated that they "will work with all relevant standards".

For more information on the exciting promise of XML, visit www.topXML.com.

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