XML Common Business Library (xCBL), version 3.0

Version 3.0 of xCBL represents a fundamental change in scope and design goals, providing support for direct goods scenarios, ERP integrations, and standards such as RosettaNet and OBI, along with many flavors of industry-standard X12 and UN/EDIFACT EDI. xCBL version 3.0 was announced at the eLink conference in Hong Kong on November 29, 2000. (See the press release.)

xCBL version 3.0 is different from the preceding versions in one major respect: instead of being a single, extensible set of documents for doing Order Management, it has become a wide-ranging set of messages intended to provide interoperability across a broader range of direct goods and procurement scenarios, and to act as a central language for managing different syntaxes, as well as a simple set of messages for doing e-commerce.

xCBL 3.0 is provided in SOX Schema format, W3C XSDL Schema format, XDR Schema format (including sets of schemas for use with Microsoft BizTalk Server), and XML DTD format to support all types of applications. There are very minor differences between the XML instances used with these different structural descriptions for validation and parsing. These differences are described in the April 2000 xCBL User's Group Newsletter.