VAN FTP

Introduction

Value added network is typically a paid service to exchange the data between Trading partner. Traditionally most of the VAN cases are for transmitting EDI document, however it can also be used for exchanging XML or any proprietary document.

VAN gives additional functionalities such as

1. Leased dedicated network to exchange data in a secure way.
2. Translation,Validation, transformation and lookup.
3. Auditing capability.
4. Data synchronization service.
5. Variety of Transport offering.
6. Advanced notification and Web Interface.
7. It may also have few industry standard service like FTP, FTPS, SFTP (SSH FTP), HTTP and HTTPS etc for message exchange.

B2B Configuration

B2B can be configured to exchange files to VAN (Value added Network) FTP interface. The configuration is as same as simple FTP delivery channel configuration.

If the VAN provider exposes FTP interface as a mailbox, meaning, the path to transfer file may not be in-line with regular FTP.

For example, a regular FTP, may have path lik "/tmp/outbound/" and "/tmp/inbound/". Some, VAN providers FTP interface, may have path like "inbound/" and "outbound/" and there cannot be a directory under a directory. This is referred as a mailbox as opposed to folder or directory in FTP.

To cater for the later case mentioned above, you may have to enable "is VAN Mailbox" transport parameter in FTP delivery channel by providing "true".

Other configuration remain same for any FTP endpoint.

contributors of this post: Ramesh and Sinkar