Getting the technology in place is only one aspect of the task of introducing AS2. You also need to manage the relationships you have with your trading partners in four ways:

• Making yourself available to receive AS2 messages when your trading partners want to send you messages;
• Keeping track of expiring certificates;
• Detecting problems when sending to partners and;
• Detecting security issues.

If you decide to run your own AS2 solution and connect directly to your partners— rather than working through a service provider—you will effectively become a VAN provider with one client. As well as making sure your AS2 software is connected and ready to receive at all times—if you are not online and ready to receive, your partners’ attempts to send to you will fail—you will be responsible for back-ups and disaster recovery procedures.

You will also need to track the expiration dates on your partners’ certificates and contact partners before their certificate expires to arrange for a new certificate to be sent to ensure that the smooth flow of documents is not interrupted. Obviously you should also make sure you provide your trading partners with the new version of your certificate before the old one expires.

A daily task will be to handle those occasions when messages fail, whether because of issues in your own AS2 solution, in your partners’ AS2 solutions or in the networks that connect them. Most failures will be the result of temporary connection glitches and won’t result in major disruption as long as you keep on top of spotting and fixing them. The final ongoing requirement will be to ensure that your solution is as robust as possible. One regular task will be to install any security patches for your AS2 software as soon as they are released. The second will be to check the AS2 software logs for suspicious activity to try to determine if someone is “probing” your system.

If you do decide to run your AS2 solution in house, you should look for software that makes these activities as easy and quick as possible. GXS estimates that taking into account software licenses, hardware procurement, purchase of trading partner-specific templates, keeping a permanent Internet connection and employing staff with the necessary skills, will cost a small company with low transaction volumes around £6,000 - £18,000 in the first year to set up an AS2 solution in-house. In addition, ongoing annual costs of £3,000 - £9,000 a year will be required to maintain it and add further trading partners. A large company with high transaction volumes, which would involve a more complex software solution and greater staffing requirements, would need to spend £80,000+ in the first year to implement a solution and £60,000 to £600,000 a year thereafter.

Working through a service provider will allow you to offload most of the management hassle of running an AS2 solution—and will also reduce your operating costs. GXS estimates that for a company sending 300 documents a month it will typically cost less than £1,200 a year to use the GXS AS2 Outsourcing Service, saving 50 percent or more when compared with the cost of running an AS2 service in-house and when the total cost of ownership is taken into account.