Planning for e-commerce system development presents some interesting choices. Proprietary, platforms work well but the emergence of Web Services and Electronic Business Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) promise a more open and extensible framework for these systems. In response to these issues, and building on their experience leading the development of EDI, the UN CEFACT committee partnered with OASIS to develop ebXML. This overview of the ebXML will describe the concepts and design behind this language, followed by samples, applications and examples. Designed for executives, managers, project leaders, and system architects, this overview will include a brief history of how ebXML was developed, the conceptual architecture, sample partner profile applications, messages and other constructs of the core infrastructure of ebXML. Attendees will understand ebXML, its potential, and how to begin developing to take advantage of its powerful new XML based Web services, and how to participate in it's ongoing development.