The benefits of participating in a trading community and exchanging business documents electronically include the reduction in cost associated with a traditional, paper-based exchange as well as a reduction in the number of errors inherent in such an exchange. After all, critical transactions involving purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, and other documents drive your business. The ability to participate in a trading community to exchange this information efficiently and securely is essential to success.
Partner Gateway provides benefits to all types of participants in a trading community. For the Community Manager, it provides real-time visibility into the entire supply chain, which helps improve data accuracy and decrease cycle times. Community participants who use Partner Gateway - Express can join the trading community with minimal cost and effort.
Additional benefits of a Partner Gateway trading community include scalability, ease of use, and flexibility.
Partner Gateway is scalable. For example, an enterprise acting as the Community Manager can easily add additional servers to accommodate growth in the size of the trading community. See System configuration options for additional details.
The Partner Gateway - Express customer can upgrade to Enterprise or Advanced Edition should the enterprise require more sophisticated functionality or enterprise-level trading volume. For example, customers who must support additional document formats or who want to connect to additional community participants can install the Advanced Edition.
Ease of use is essential to the successful deployment and maintenance of a trading community. The tasks involved in planning, setting up, and running a trading community can be performed either by the enterprise itself or by an IBM Community Integration Services team. See your IBM representative for information about these services.
Joining a trading community is easy. The community participant provides some basic information (such as the types of protocols it can support) to the Community Manager. The Community Manager uses this information to define a connection between the hub and the participant. After these steps are completed, the participant is ready to send test documents.
Once defined to the community, participants can administer their own profiles and monitor the flow of their own documents, subject to the level of authorization defined by the Community Manager.
For community participants using Partner Gateway - Express or another connectivity tool, joining a trading community is equally simple.
Another key requirement for a trading community is the ability to handle diverse transports, protocols, and document formats. Partner Gateway supports a wide range of industry-standard transport and business protocols, while also providing superior customization options for tailoring document-handling and workflow to the specific needs of your enterprise.
For example, you might exchange purchase orders with a subset of your trading partners through RosettaNet PIPs. With other trading partners, you might have an agreement to exchange EDI-formatted documents. You can accommodate both types of participants in your trading community.
Similarly, you can use Partner Gateway to make a Web service available to your community participants. You can also access the Web services of your community participants. Partner Gateway acts as a SOAP proxy.
You can exchange a wide variety of documents with community participants, using industry-standard business protocols such as RosettaNet, AS1, AS2, SOAP, cXML, XML, EDI, and binary over a variety of transports:
Depending on the transport protocol, Partner Gateway supports either synchronous or asynchronous business document exchange, or both. The HTTP and HTTPS transport portocols both support synchronous and asynchronous document exchanges. For AS2, cXML, RNIF, or SOAP documents that will be used in synchronous exchanges, you must specify the associated SyncCheck handler on the HTTP or HTTPS target. Asynchronous document transfer is supported in other transport protocols such as File System, FTP, SMTP, etcetera.
You have a variety of choices for how the documents are processed--everything from passthrough routing to translation into custom XML.
If the transports, business protocols, and processing options offered by Partner Gateway do not meet your requirements, you can customize document-handling and workflow with user exits. User exits are breaks in the natural process flow designed to permit developers to insert customized processing. Through the use of user exits, you can send and receive documents using customized protocols and seamlessly invoke customized packing, unpacking, validation, translation, and transformation routines. User exits can be used to extend or modify an existing document-handling function or to create entirely new ones.
For communication with your back-end systems, you can exchange RosettaNet Service Content (RNSC), SOAP, cXML, XML, EDI, and binary documents over a variety of transport protocols:
Partner Gateway supports multiple security standards including third-party certificate authorities from VeriSign and Thawte, SSL support, and Non-Repudiation as required for full AS2 compliance.
See Appendix. Summary of supported business and transport protocols for additional information.