Hi,
We are currently send POs to our supplier's via email.
They inturn call/fax/email the acknowledgement.

Now we want the Supplier to stop calling/faxing/emailing the buyers to inform the
acknowledgement.

Instead, they'll just reply to the email.
That is to be taken as an ack and the client wants to update some fields on the PO
header.

They are on UNIX/Baan IV c3.

I am using mailx to send the POs.
Now how do I do the updating Baan part?

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
R,
Jon

One way would be to create a shell script to process the replies and extract the information you will need to update the Baan data. Perhaps the user who receives the reply will need to save the mail message as a file in a specific directory, and a cron task would run the shell script that would look at the files in the directory to extract the data from the mail reply.

Then there are a couple of methods I have some experience with in order to update the data in Baan. One way would be to take the data extracted from the reply and create a file containing the data in a format that can be imported using Baan Exchange. So you would use Exchange to update the PO header.

Another method would be to use Baan's C interface, which allows you to execute functions in a Baan DLL library from a C program. So the C program that would take the extracted data and call the custom Baan DLL with the extracted data as the argument(s). The Baan DLL would update the PO header.

Francis