Trading Partner Integration

WLI enables you to automate and manage relationships with your trading partners so that you can streamline your business processes with customers, suppliers, distributors, and other partners to get a top-down view of business transactions across the value chain.

Table 8-1 Trading Partner Integration in WLI
Feature	Description
Visual public and private process integration	WLI leverages the unified programming model and run-time framework of Workshop to provide end-to-end process integration with easily implemented controls and templates.
Support for leading B2B industry protocols and standards	WLI supports the following protocols and standards: ebXML 1.0 and 2.0. RosettaNet 1.1 and 2.0. Web services.
Trading Partner Management (TPM) and repository access	WLI provides sophisticated TPM capabilities through the WLI Administration Console. Administrators can easily manage a central repository of trading partner profile information, including protocol bindings used for secure message exchanges between trading partners, services representing public processes, security, and bulk import and export capabilities. Authorized processes and web services can dynamically access trading partner information by using easily implemented controls. In addition to the administration console, MBean APIs are provided so that third-party MBean clients can be written to access the TPM repository.
Easy access to run-time information	WLI provides flexible run-time tracking, audit, and reporting capabilities to show a top-down view of trading partner activities and business transactions across the value chain.
High performance and availability	WLI supports fast and reliable exchange of business messages between trading partners, and supports clustered configuration for scalability and failover, message persistence, low-level acknowledgments and receipts, and transactional integrity.
High security, auditing, and nonrepudiation	WLI ensures private, secure, and reliable exchange of business messages among trading partners by using transport-level security with SSL and message-level security with digital signature and encryption. The certificates and private keys are stored in protected keystores, and the passwords are stored in encrypted form in the WLI PasswordStore.
Interoperability	WLI operates in conjunction with a wide range of B2B servers from other vendors. For trading partners who want a zero-install solution, WLI can be extended easily to offer a browser or FTP interface.

Figure 8-1 shows an example of basic interactive business processes between trading partners.

The buyer process sends an order to the seller by using a business protocol (ebXML or RosettaNet) that is agreed upon. The seller process receives the request, writes the order to a database, receives an invoice from an internal back-end system, and then sends the invoice to the buyer process by using the same business protocol. Such a message exchange is called a conversation. The initiating trading partner (buyer in this case) is the initiator and the responding trading partner (seller in this case) is the participant.

Figure 8-2 shows a partial view of the TPM home page in the WLI Administration Console, which allows administrators to manage trading partner profiles, security certificates, protocol bindings, services, message tracking and auditing, trading partner activity, and so on.

Overview of WebLogic Integration

Trading Partner Integration