WebSphere Partner Gateway is a business-to-business (B2B) community management solution. With WebSphere Partner Gateway, 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.
WebSphere Partner Gateway provides users who have needs that fall outside the range of options delivered with the product, to customize the process at a number of crucial stages. You can develop and deploy 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 Partner Gateway by using these user exits.