You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
BizTalk EDI Functional Acknowledgement Reporting and Monitoring in BizTalk360
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the most commonly used messaging protocol in B2B data exchange. BizTalk has native support for EDI’s primary standards X12 and EDIFACT. BizTalk also has support for popular standards such as HIPPA and KEDIFACT which are derived from X12 and EDIFACT respectively. For more information on BizTalk EDI support, refer article “BizTalk Server EDI Functionality”.
BizTalk has EDI Status reporting capability built on top of BAM to help the support personnel to know the status of EDI transactions, interchanges and acknowledgements correlated. You can find these reports in the Group Hub page of BizTalk Administration Console. For more information on EDI reporting capabilities refer article “EDI and AS2 Status Reporting”
BizTalk360 also has these reporting capabilities in its web console and adds data monitoring capability on top of that. For more information on EDI reporting capabilities in BizTalk360, refer the article “EDI Reporting Capabilities”. For more information on Data Monitoring capabilities of BizTalk360, refer the article “EDI Data Monitoring”.
However, if you have used these reports on day to day basis, you would have realized that there are few gaps which are left open and those would have been really helpful for the support personnel. BizTalk360’s constant endeavor has been to identify such gaps and fill them to help BizTalk support personnel. With this goal, BizTalk360 team has spent lot of effort in bringing few new reporting capabilities into its upcoming release v8.3.
In this article, I will be explaining about a gap in Functional Acknowledgment Status Reporting and show you how it will be addressed in BizTalk360’s upcoming release v8.3.
Functional Acknowledgement Status Reporting as-is
Consider a B2B scenario where Fabrikam sends out an X12 interchange containing multiple functional groups and transaction sets to its partner Contoso and expects a technical Acknowledgement (TA1) and functional Acknowledgements (997) for each functional group. Note: Please refer the article “Configuring Trading Partner Agreement ” to know how to configure trading partners to receive acknowledgements.

- Right click on the individual record

- In the Interchange status and ACK details window, select Functional ACK(s).

Problem Space
- Think from the perspective of a support personnel who have to identify the interchanges for which the negative functional acknowledgements are received or no functional acknowledgement is received. This is nearly impossible as he/she will have to click on each interchange record. This has led many people to write their own SQL queries or SSRS reports. One such example you can see in a blog article here.
- Also support personnel might want to receive an alert when there are negative functional acknowledgements. Currently this cannot be achieved through BizTalk admin console.
BizTalk360 Solution
The two issues discussed above are pretty common with our customers who are using EDI functionality. BizTalk360 addresses these issues in its upcoming release v8.3 by introducing couple of new features.- Functional ACK Status Report: A brand new type of report is added to existing EDI reports to display the status of functional acknowledgements in the grid itself.
- Data Monitoring of Functional ACK Status Report: When you create data monitoring alerts on the Functional ACK Status Reports, you will be able to receive alerts when negative functional acknowledgements are received.
You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
BizTalk EDI Functional Acknowledgement Reporting and Monitoring in BizTalk360
Functional ACK Status Report
BizTalk360 adds a brand new type of reporting called “Functional ACK Status” Report to the existing list of EDI reports.


Data monitoring on Functional ACK status report
Now in EDI Data monitoring section of BizTalk360, you can create Data Monitoring alerts to receive warning or error alerts when there are rejected functional acknowledgements. Below is a snapshot that shows configuration of one such alert.
Summary
In summary, we hope that these two additional features will make life of support personal easy in terms of handling functional acknowledgements. These features are already being developed and undergoing a testing cycle. If you have any feedback, please write to support@biztalk360.com. There are few more EDI features planned in for upcoming release v8.3. We will be blogging about them in coming days.You can download the entire article as a PDF document.
BizTalk EDI Functional Acknowledgement Reporting and Monitoring in BizTalk360