Biztalk schemas, documentations, general confusion

["Troels R Christensen" <troelsriisbrich@hotmail.com>]

Hi all

I am currently working on a project where we have to enable our client to 
communicate with their partners using different formats – EDI and XML. They 
will be exchanging standard EDI documents, ORDERS, ORDRSP, INVOIC, DESADV, 
PRICAT and others.

On the EDI they already have a somewhat running solution and implementation 
guides for the different documents for their partners.

The XML is all new and we have to decide on message formats and 
implementation guides. We would like to stay as close to an existing 
standard as possible and have found the UBL. Unfortunately we are having 
some difficulties.

We are finding it hard to get an overall view of the UBL specifications – is 
it possible to get further documentation for classes on the class diagrams? 
ex. descriptions for the attributes.

On EDI they use a subset for the different messages and we would like to do 
the same for XML, making sure that we are able to communicate the same 
amount of information as with the EDI files. On the DESADV for instance the 
UBL specification contains far too much information on some points and too 
few on others. Do any of you have any pointers on how to attack a task as 
this? - Creating the implementation guides and schemas to support them.

Finally we will be using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 but find that the 
schemas supplied can not be used directly. Do any of you know if it is 
indeed possible to achieve this? Maybe you have tried it? If it is not 
possible at all we will have to create our very own schemas – making these 
as much like the UBL schemas.

Yours – Hope you can help
Troels