HI Scott,

This document is an Covast's Document and it is not really objectif.

Because, I work on an EDI's project with Covast and Biztalk 2004, i can give more information.

First, when Covast says that you can use the VAN (Value Added Network like Atlas400), in fact you need to have another application like MAxWare to have the connection on the network.

When it is saying that Covast know the EDI Inovert, it is true but not all the schemas and not all the segments (Node).

And i don't talk about all the bugs that we have, but Covast is working on it.

So if you want my opinion, Covast need to be improved and when you use it in the firsts times, it is not an accelerator (not easy to understand).

Regards
Denis

How much does it cost to add the Covast Accelerator?

Hi Denis,



I do not agree that you cannot "out of the box" work with VAN (you
example Atlas400 (X400)). Let me compare this with Biztalk.



We all agree that Biztalk can do HTTP "out of the box". But BTS is
using IIS to do that, same for FTP. Why do we agree that BTS can do
HTTP? Because you can do the administration in BTS (read: you set the
URL and properties in BTS of you customer/application connections).

Well, it is the same with Covast. You can do all the administration and
setup of the connections mentioned in the document. But to use the
protocol (like HTTP, X400, FTP, ...) you need an program to do that.
For example for HTTP, you can use IIS, for X400 you can use MaxWare.



About the second, I agree that Covast has not all the definitions of
the EDI messages in the world (like Inovert, what is a France specific
EDI format for transport I believe). But you can get a complete (long)
list of all known EDI messages in Covast format. If your messages are
in the Covast list, you gain a lot of time in the implementation.



Tom,