Minutes from the EDIINT WG Session at the IETF December 1997 Meeting
Rik Drummond, WG Chair, and Dale Moberg, Editor for the Secure EDI over
HTTP Applicability Statement Draft, made presentations during the meeting.
Rik Drummond welcomed everyone and reviewed the WG status. Approximately
20% of the 30 attendees had read the three WG Drafts. We will submit the
first two drafts to the Experimental RFC track as a holding action until
the S/MIME issue is resolved one way or the other, since both drafts
reference S/MIME. There are three Internet Drafts now available. A
fourth, specific to the healthcare industry (HL7), is expected in January.
The current drafts are: Requirements, Applicability Statement for Secure
EDI over SMTP, and Applicability Statement for Secure EDI over HTTP.
Rik noted that Microsoft Exchange is still causing problems because or the
way MIME / MAPI translations take place. It is not know if Exchange version
5.5 fixes the problem.
Dale Moberg presented the status of the Secure EDI over HTTP Draft. It
follows closely the SMTP Draft, making only changes necessary to convert
the SMTP-based recommendations to the HTTP protocol. Dale noted that one
of the problems he found in a test implementation of Secure EDI over HTTP
is that the servers timeout if the response takes to long. Einar Stefferud
noted that maybe this makes the HTTP protocol inappropriate for this
application and we should look for other transport technologies.
Several general comments were made during the meeting:
Keith Moore commented that we could modify the MDN and make it specific to
EDI usage. This may help us in the definition of the MDN for the Healthcare
HL7 Draft. This would allow a single message that contains the signed
receipt and the transaction response data to be returned in response to an
HL7 transaction.
Einar Stefferud noted that Content-ID was available as a MIME level header
for identifying separate MIME parts for use in more complex receipts.
Finally we discussed the possible need for time-stamping of EDI
transactions.
Submitted on January 2, 1998 by Rik Drummond Chair EDIINT WG.
