WebSphere Business Integration Connect is a business-to-business (B2B) community management solution. With Business Integration Connect, you exchange data and processes within a trading community, crossing enterprise boundaries and extending business integration beyond the enterprise and into the community. A trading community typically revolves around a hub--an enterprise that acts as the Community Manager. Community participants send documents to the hub, where they are processed and then routed to the appropriate destination.
In Version 4.2.1 and previous versions of Business Integration Connect, hub processing was limited to a configurable set of options hard-coded into the product. While these options were fairly wide-ranging, some potential trading scenarios were not supported. Starting with the present version, 4.2.2, users who have needs that fall outside the range of options delivered with the product will be able to customize the process at a number of crucial stages by developing and deploying plug-in modules that support additional transports, business protocols and so forth, based on a newly developed set of APIs. The points in the process where these plug-in modules can be invoked are called user exits.
The following chapters document how to customize WebSphere Business Integration Connect by using these user exits.