AS2 is the business messaging protocol of choice of many fortune 1000 and small companies.  It is used to exchange important business documents between companies and trading partners securely over the Internet, including EDI, XML, PDF, TXT, images, and others.  It is used by many different industries including: retail, banking, oil, health care, government, and others.  Drummond Group Inc. has been there from the first steps of AS2 launching with CEO, Rik Drummond co-authoring the AS2 specification.  Drummond Group also has administered the AS2 certification since 2000.  In this article we look back and toward the future of Drummond AS2 Certification.
 
Drummond Group issued the first press release on AS2 Interop Certification back in December, 2000.  That first certification test was the first of many to come in the decade to follow. Drummond's vendor neutrality was an important factor in gaining trust from the software community.  Many more companies entered certification testing and continue to do so. 
 
Initially, certification testing was performed manually with each participant writing their own testing scripts and entering their own test data.  Since then, AS2 Certification has been automated using the Drummond Group patented InSitu® technology.  InSitu® was first introduced in June 2003.  Its benefits in reducing the interoperability testing effort of AS2 certification as well as in software testing were easily seen then and that cost savings remains today.  Since then it has taken on a key role and it is now mandatory for any new AS2 participant to integrate InSitu®.

Drummond Group's AS2 interoperability test and certification is the largest and longest running automated interoperability test of its kind in the world.  The structure of the testing Drummond Group uses remains the same now as it was back in the first test in 2000.  However, the test process has not remained stagnant and significant improvements have been made over the years based on Drummond experience and participant feedback.  Those ten years of Interop testing experience has successfully been fed into other standards testing currently being facilitated by Drummond Group. 
 
Along the way, AS2 certification introduced Optional Profiles to better serve the needs of different industries.  Currently, a total of 6 different optional profiles are tested in each test round including:  AS2 Reliability, Certificate Exchange (CEM), Multiple Attachments (MA), Filename Preservation (FN), Filename Preservation for MA and Filename Preservation with Duplication Message Notification (FN-MDN).  AS2 Restart for Very Large Message exchange is the latest profile to be added and will be certified commencing with AS2 3Q 2010. 
 
New industries continue to send us questions about adoption of AS2.  Just recently, the South African Tax Reserve Board approved the use of AS2 in 2009.  Also, the shipping and logistics industry now utilizes AS2. 
 
AS2 certification has now become an integral part of many AS2 software and some firmware companies' quality assurance programs and it will continue to remain so into the future.   The challenge of releasing new product versions and testing them for interoperability would be an enormous task and cost for those companies going it alone.  Imagine the cost and challenge of acquiring competitive products, installing them in their QA test lab and then learning to use them, not to mention always having to keep the latest versions in house.
 
AS2 certification solves these challenges by bringing competitive AS2 products together in a non-competitive environment.  AS2 certification also encourages earlier versions of AS2 products, especially those still deployed by end-users, to enter into testing at no additional cost.   By bringing in the latest version along with older versions, Drummond Group is encouraging a test environment that closely mirrors what is deployed in production environments.  By mirroring production deployments in Interop testing, new versions can be tested with older product versions, thus removing upgrade concerns by end-users.  All of this is made possible with the ease of testing that InSitu® automation provides.
 
To recap, the AS2 standard and AS2 certification has a decade of history now, and the test of time has proven its worth and benefit.  It has evolved into more than AS2 companies just gaining certification, but is an integral part of their quality assurance process and programs.  The non-competitive testing environment, the reduced testing costs and product quality benefits, and ease of testing through automation, ensures that AS2 certification will continue to give end-users a choice of quality AS2 products to choose from. 
Also, with the inclusion of new profiles like AS2 Restart for Very Large Messages exchange, we can confidently say that adoption and interest in AS2 products will continue to grow.
 
Drummond Group press releases on AS2