Overview

The goal is to enable the Community Manager to send a document or set of documents (electronically) to a participant or to receive a document or set of documents from a participant. The hub manages the receipt of the documents, the transformation to other formats (if required), and the delivery of the documents. The hub can also be configured to provide security for incoming and outgoing documents.

The documents exchanged between the hub and the participant are typically in a standard format and represent a specific business interaction. For example, the participant might sent a purchase order request as a RosettaNet 3A4 PIP, a cXML OrderRequest document, or an EDI-X12 interchange with an 850 transaction. The hub transforms the document into a format that can be used by an application at the Community Manager. Similarly, a Community Manager back-end application might send a purchase order response in its own custom format that is transformed into a standard format. The transformed document is then sent to the participant.

Figure 1. How documents flow through the hub
This figure shows how documents flow from a participant through the hub to the Community Manager or from the Community Manager through the hub to a participant

In this guide, you will see how to configure the hub and then how to set up the participants. You will also learn how to configure security for the hub.

Notice in Figure 1 that the WebSphere Partner Gateway server and the Community Manager back-end application are all owned by the Community Manager. The Community Manager is the company that owns the hub, but the Community Manager is also a participant of the hub. As you will see in later chapters, you define a profile for the Community Manager just as you do for participants.

Note: This document shows you how to create connections that flow from the Community Manager back-end application to a participant gateway and from a participant to the Community Manager gateway. After the documents arrive at the Community Manager gateway, you will probably want to integrate them with a back-end application, such as WebSphere InterChange Server or WebSphere MQ Broker. The tasks required to integrate between WebSphere Partner Gateway and such back-end applications are defined in the Enterprise Integration Guide.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2003, 2005