Future directions for electronic messaging

To keep pare with the huge change in the way companies operate, messaging services and systems have had to adapt. With the growth of distributed computing and local area networks, electronic messaging has become more complicated as users choose different vendors products and therefore different message formats and addressing conventions to communicate electronically. Users are now not merely capable of sending and receiving inter-company messages from a tied terminal but have the capability for intra-company electronic communication using the increasing number of network services. This article reviews the emergence of standards, messaging via the Internet, developments in electronic data interchange (FDI) standards, and their security implications as well as gives an update on the new standard for FDI.