Create a live data feed between suppliers and ourselves

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure what area to place this question or even if it will make any sense.

I am trying to develop a method that will allow my companies website to have a live data feed with all of our customers, what i mean by this that we will have access to there stock list that as we make an order they and we get automatically updated and vice versa. I originally thought of them hosting the database and we simply connect to it and then any changes they make would be automatically updated and any orders we make can be added to our database and removed from theirs. In theory this would work for one supplier but not for multiple.

My second thought was if both us and our suppliers had copies of the same tables on our databases and then as any changes were made we could simply update each other using XML files (at this point I am thinking along the lines of RSS where when a connection is made on our part the server checks for changes and receives the file to make the appropriate changes) I may be going way off in the wrong direction, but these are my current thoughts.

Has anyone any ideas. My knowledge of XML is negligible so I'm not sure of the technologies that i should be using or anything else so any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

This is what EDI was created for. The technology is a relatively small part of the problem. Privacy, dealing with unmatched data definitions, authentication, etc. is the real problem.

Thanks I shall look into this