Babelabout

Let's try Babelabout!

Let's start with a few words about the scenario of this demonstration. Imagine that you are a supplier of a big retailer who wants you to send your invoices as EDIFACT messages. On your side, you know how to extract the information you put on your invoice by running a query on your (Microsoft Access) database. Your extract might looks like the following file: DemoInvoice.csv (right-click on the link and select "Save Target As..." to save this file on your computer). You can either open this file with Notepad or with Excel if you have the comma "," configured as the separator of CSV files. Be careful not to change this file (you can download it again if needed). Then, regarding the EDIFACT format and, for instance, the AS2 transport protocol the retailer is asking you to use, you just need to contact us. After some discussions with you and the EDI team of your customer, we setup everything for you ;-)

  1. Open a Windows Explorer window.
  2. Type ftp://babelabout.dyndns.org/ into the Address edit box and click Enter.
  3. You will then be prompted to enter your FTP user name and password. For this demonstration, enter Demo as username, babel as password and click Log On.
  4. Then, you can copy-paste (or drag-and-drop) the DemoInvoice.csv file from your local folder (where you saved it) to your FTP folder in the same way you do between local folders.
  5. After refreshing the content of the Windows Explorer (by pressing F5), you should notice that the platform has successfully grabbed your file, when it has been renamed by adding a GUID (Global Unique IDentifier) and changing the extension from ".csv" to ".sent".
  6. To end this little demonstration, you can click on http://babelabout.dyndns.org/Metro/ which represents the "mailbox" on your customer's side. You should then be able to locate a file which has in its name the same GUID as the file you now have in your FTP folder. It is the translation of your message received by your happy customer which will be automatically entered in its system - thus removing the need for double encoding!

That was just a little demonstration, feel free to play with the content of the CSV file to ensure that we are not cheating, but actually making a real translation. If you would like to see this working with your own messages, just send a short e-mail to babelabout@gmail.com with sample instance(s) and any "EDI specification" ;-)