A data manipulation appliance can be installed or plugged into a computer network between business partners, and can perform many of the difficult and tedious data manipulation operations in a substantially automated manner. Examples of operations that can be performed by an embodiment of the apparatus include, but are not limited to, encryption, authentication, auditing, shaping data to a common intermediate format for exchange between partners, other auditing of data exchanges in transaction logs, filtering data for privacy compliance and risk management, error detection and correction, mapping internal non-standard data elements to external standard code sets, proxy and protocol re-writing, and so on. The appliance can be embedded with various tools to perform these operations, and therefore appears to be "intelligent."