Secure B2B Trading with AS2 Gateway

Handmade (Pvt) Ltd is a small company with around 50 employees, which was started a few years back. Handmade makes small ornaments which will be sold to retail stores worldwide including some of the Fortune 500 companies. Most of these large companies constantly demand Handmade to use a secure protocol to send invoices, instead of emailing them. Of course, they have been emailing all the invoices to their business partners so far. Because of this, they have been losing a lot of partners recently.

Mr. Allen, the CEO of the company, asked his wife who is the CFO of Handmade, to take care of the above concern. But same as Mr. Allen, Mrs. Allen is not a techy person. So what Mrs. Allen did was, she googled her problems.

During the first three or four results, she came with an answer!!!

AS2(Applicability Statement 2) protocol

AS2 is a MIME-Based Secure Peer-to-Peer Business Data Interchange Using HTTP and Mrs. Allen found out that this is the best protocol that they can use for their organization. Most importantly this protocol is used by a lot of large companies including their partners.

As every good thing comes with a price, Mrs. Allen understood that AS2 protocol also has this barrier too. AS2 protocol was a bit complex for Mrs. Allen to understood. She asked google’s help again. Her next exact search phrase was “AS2 Gateways”. (Mrs. Allen only knew about these two words at that time. :P ) Though there were a lot of results, Mrs. Allen found AdroitLogic’s AS2 Gateway. Then Mrs. Allen started looking into AdroitLogic and she found out that a lot of giant companies have trusted Adroitlogic including Singapore Exchange and Wallmart. That was enough for Mrs. Allen to go with their AS2 Gateway.

Since Mrs. Allen is new to AS2 protocol, as the initial step, she created a trial account on as2gateway.com very easily. Now her task is to check whether this is what their company is looking for. Here’s what Mrs. Allen has discovered regarding AdroitLogic’s AS2 Gateway.

User Management

In an organization, there might be more than one person to handle AS2 Related things. AS2 Gateway has solved this problem quite impressively by providing a very easy to use user management dashboard. In AS2 Gateway user management is divided into three major parts

1. Role management
   Roles can be created by adding different permissions.

2. User groups management
User groups can be created by adding different roles.

3. Users management
User groups can be added to each user in the particular organization. Users will have the permissions, according to the user group they belong.

Certificates Management

Certificates do another major role in AS2 Protocol. But it is definitely a headache to manage them. AS2 Gateway provides a well-organized UI so users have nothing to worry about the certificates. The user can either import their existing certificates or create a new certificate very easily. Since Mrs. Allen is not familiar with certificates, this UI is everything she was looking for.

Stations

When it comes to AS2 Protocol, there should be trading partners. In order to work with their partners, Handmade needs to have a station. So Mrs. Allen navigated to station view and started creating a new station. AS2 Gateway has created a certificate for the station automatically when Mrs. Allen created the account. So when she is adding a new station, she could simply use the created certificate. Yes, she could always create a new certificate, but she has gone with the easier way. :) Mrs. Allen wanted to get notified when there is new incoming message, so she has enabled that feature too ;)

After creating the station, Mrs. Allen needed to share her station’s configuration with their partners. So they have asked her to email the configuration. She has navigated to the partner configuration view, provided in the station.

She has shared the configuration with the provided email and the following email has been sent to the partner.

Partners

Now Mrs. Allen has to add her partners to the organization. She figured out that this can be very easily done from the Partners view. Since this is her first time, Mrs. Allen was a bit nervous to add the correct information. She wanted to test the configuration properly before sending the messages. So she has contacted their partners and asked configuration of a test environment. Then she has created a test partner on AS2 Gateway. Her intention was to create a production partner after verifying the test partner. Gladly AS2 Gateway supports this feature.

Messages

Now everything is set and Mrs. Allen wanted to send a test message to her partner’s test environment. Mrs. Allen has sent the test message from the compose message view very easily.

Statistics

Handmade should be able to analyze their statistics and using the AS2 Gateway Dashboard they easily do this.

SFTP

In addition to all those cool features, AS2 Gateway supports SFTP as well. After Handmade has set up SFTP by simply clicking the setup SFTP button, all the relevant information will be given. With SFTP, user doesn’t even need to use the web application. Simple as that.

With all these features, Mrs. Allen was very happy with AS2 Gateway. FInally, she has assigned another person to AS2 Gateway by creating a user with relevant permissions. Then she added the email as2gateway-support@adroitlogic.com to her contacts because she knew that adroitlogic team will be there to assist anytime if needed.