In "Safe and Secure Electronic Commerce," we outlined the standards and works-in-progress upon which secure Internet EDI recommendations are based (see Network Computing Online at www.NetworkComputing.com/719/719cn4.html). In this follow-up, we delve into the CommerceNet-sponsored tests of the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) EDI over Internet (EDIINT) workgroup's recommendations. The testing focuses on products that implement the secure EDIINT recommendations to determine which deserve CommerceNet's stamp of approval.

If the IETF had not taken on the task of recommending how to conduct secure EDI over the Internet and if CommerceNet, a consortium of major busi nesses that promotes commerce on the Internet (www.commerce.net), had not sponsored an interoperability pilot, we would be some years off from interoperable EDI products on the Internet. The learning curve is very steep for nonsecurity personnel to implement EDI security. And there are all types of small issues that aren't very obvious in the RFC or standards. We found many of them during our CommerceNet pilot testing, and we'll discuss some here.

That testing had an unusual flavor, in that the initial participating vendors worked together to produce a mılange of interoperable products based on the EDIINT recommendations. Our focus was on the products that passed muster and on the critical issues we unearthed as we progressed through the 14 tests that make up CommerceNet's Interoperability Pilot.

The secure Internet EDI work-in-progress recommendations are moving through the IETF approval process to become RFCs (see ftp://ietf.org/internet-drafts/ draft-ietf-ediint-req-03.txt and ftp:// ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ediint-as1-04.txt). CommerceNet provided the means to test implementations for interoperabi lity.

Thanks to these tests, several off-the-shelf, interoperable products that offer secure EDI over the Internet are available. Currently, Actra Business Systems, Digital Equipment Corp. and Premenos have EDI products that can interoperate in a secure manner over Internet. Premenos offers the well-known Templar, and Actra will be introducing its ECXpert product. Digital will offer the secure Internet interface developed from these tests on a customer-by-customer basis, and Sterling Commerce probably will offer a product this year based on these tests. Additionally, two other vendors, Harbinger and Atlas Products International, should complete testing by the time this article is published. We also expect three to four more vendors to start testing this fall (see "Test Participants," page 92).