cXML is a protocol, created by Ariba

Ariba

Ariba is a software and information technology services company located in Sunnyvale, California.- Early life :Ariba was founded in 1996 by Bobby Lent, Boris Putanec, Paul Touw, Rob Desantis, Ed Kinsey, Paul Hegarty, and Keith Krach on the idea of using the Internet to enable companies to...

, intended for communication of business documents between procurement

Procurement

Procurement is the acquisition of goods or services. It is favourable that the goods/services are appropriate and that they are procured at the best possible cost to meet the needs of the purchaser in terms of quality and quantity, time, and location...

 applications, e-commerce hubs and suppliers. cXML is based on XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 and provides formal XML schema

XML schema

An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself...

s for standard business transactions, allowing programs to modify and validate documents without prior knowledge of their form.

The protocol does not include the full breadth of interactions some parties may wish to communicate. However, it can be expanded through the use of extrinsic elements and newly-defined domains for various identifiers. This expansion is the limit of point-to-point configurations necessary for communication.

The current protocol includes documents for setup (company details and transaction profiles), catalogue content, application integration (including the widely-used PunchOut feature), original, change and delete purchase orders and responses to all of these requests, order confirmation and ship notice documents (cXML analogues of EDI

Electronic Data Interchange

Electronic data interchange is the structured transmission of data between organizations by electronic means. It is used to transfer electronic documents or business data from one computer system to another computer system, i.e...

 855 and 856 transactions) and new invoice documents.

PunchOut is a protocol for interactive sessions managed across the Internet, a communication from one application to another, achieved through a dialog of real-time, synchronous cXML messages, which support user interaction at a remote site. This protocol is most commonly used today in the form of Procurement PunchOut, which specifically supports interactions between a procurement application and a supplier’s eCommerce web site and possibly includes an intermediary for authentication and version matching.

Benefits

• Very easy to implement automated order receipt, fulfilment updates and catalogue transport
• Many sell-side solutions come with the protocol out of the box
• cXML supports remote shopping session (PunchOut) transactions
• Extensible: If your buyer relationships require more information than cXML supports intrinsically, that data may still be sent end-to-end
• Leverages XML, which is a robust language for describing information
• cXML is the only B2B XML standard that leaves much of the syntax from EDI behind

Proprietary issues

cXML is published based on the input of many companies. cXML is a protocol that is published for free on the Internet along with its DTD. It is open to all for their use without restrictions apart from publications of modifications and naming that new protocol. Essentially, everyone is free to use cXML with any and all modifications as long as they don't publish their own standard and call it "cXML". Beginning in February 1999, the cXML standard has been available for all to use. The details of its license agreement are found at http://www.cXML.org/license.cfm.