AESDirect Greatly Expands its Scope with Major Enhancements

Washington, DC March 29, 2000

On March 29, the 545th company registered to use AESDirect, the U.S. Census Bureau Internet SED filing service. With the free AESDirect service firmly established and growing, the Census Bureau announced an aggressive implementation plan for two major new capabilities today. This will greatly expand the scope of AESDirect and make it an attractive AES filing option for a larger number of companies.

"The Census Bureau is extremely pleased with the operation and industry response to AESDirect. We intend to improve the system with our commitment to these enhancements and make it even more useful and effective for the U.S. export trade community," said Chuck Woods, Assistant Division Chief of the Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Division.

With a planned implementation date of early May, 2000, AESDirect will be enhanced to allow the receipt of EDI shipment information prepared in the U.S. Customs Service's proprietary format, known as AESTIR or CATAIR. "Many existing companies and software vendors have programmed their system to be able to produce the AES AESTIR EDI files. With the introduction of this capability, AESDirect will immediately become an AES filing option for these companies", said Robert Foley, President of FCS. FCS is the company that both developed and operates the service for the Census Bureau.

Planned for June 2000, the second enhancement is AESWebLink. "AESWebLink represents a whole new level of service and interoperability that will make it easier and more efficient for companies to utilize AESDirect", Foley said. AESWebLink will enable Internet application developers to pass data from their applications into AESDirect. This will make it easier for end-users to enter data into AESDirect and eliminate double entry of data. " Since AESWebLink was first announced a few weeks ago, we have received many requests from companies eager to participate by building and testing a link from their Internet application to AESWebLink", Foley said.

Detailed information and technical specifications covering AESWebLink and the AESTIR EDI capability will be made available on the AESDirect WWW site at http://www.aesdirect.gov. To learn more about AESWebLink and AESTIR EDI processing, call Bob Foley at (301) 562-7790 extension 12.