I’ve done a lot of posts about the OCI punchOut protocol. Probably the more common implementation you will see with customers and suppliers wanting to automate employee procurement experience is with the cXML protocol. In the USA most of the large office supply, hardware supply, computers suppliers have cXML enabled with their supplier shopping sites.

cXML or commerce eXtensible Markup Language is a protocol developed by Ariba in 1999 you can read more about it at http://cxml.org  

In AX2012 there is a framework for punchOut but it doesn’t include code to handle the cXML messages. I’m providing a copy of a protocol handler as sample code that you can use as a framework for your own implementations. You can download this from http://ax2012r3cxml.codeplex.com

For setup notes please see this post

cXML punchout protocol handler installation for AX2012 R3

For setup of the external catalog once you have imported the code see this post

External catalog setup using the cXML protocol handler for PunchOut

For an overview of the user flow using cXML see this post

cXML punchOut user flow

The cXML protocol handler supports a specific set of message for the punchOut see this post

PunchOutOrderMessageHeader – operationsAllowed

For working with commodity codes from the cXML messages see this post

cXML punchOut commodity code handling

For using the message log feature for troubleshooting see this post

cXML punchOut message logging

For notes on unit of measure handling with cXML see this post

cXML PunchOut unit of measure handling

For notes on currency handling with cXML see this post

cXML PunchOut – currency handling

For additional information about cXML as described in the cXML user codes see this post

cXML User Guides

Cheers

Lachlan