What is the best standard to use for business document exchange (invoices, POs etc)?

Question

If I need to implement sending and receiving of business documents from system to system (invoices, POs, remittance advice, etc) what standard would you recommend for best interop and why? It could be XML or otherwise.

Answer 1

UBL (Universal Business Language) is the latest attempt to do this, managed by OASIS. The problem is that the holy grail of business document interop is really a long way off, if realistic at all. That is why products like Biztalk exist. Biztalk's primary purpose is to take the document in one partner's format and convert it into your format, or vice versa.

Even huge standards like ANSI X12 and Edifact were problematic because even when two partners exchanged documents using an agreed standard there were usually enough differences in the way the documents were utilized that it required custom coding to process them.

My suggestion is to expose a clean and easy to understand XML format that very closely matches your business needs and let your partners use whatever method they currently use with other partners to process your document. Trying to follow an industry standard will be much more work and probably provide little benefit.