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...have fallen short of market expectations for community integration due to scalability issues, lack of document visibility across the trading community, and minimal partner participation in community management. To solve the tough challenges of XML-based document exchange, new integration solutions must address these requirements to provide an optimal foundation for trading partner collaboration.
This article discusses the concept of community integration and offers an architectural overview of how WebSphere Business Integration Connect call enable the rapid implementation of trading communities.
What is Community Integration?
Community integration is about extending integration beyond the enterprise. It defines a document exchange framework that optimizes business processes across enterprise boundaries. Within organizations, there are numerous interenterprise relationships with external partners, some manual and others automated. Over the last 15 years, EDI has been established as a proven foundation for automating these relationships. The emergence of XML document standards such as RosettaNet, CIDX, and others has enabled the evolution of an open communication framework for interenterprise integration. However, providing an XML document exchange for these relationships does not provide community integration in itself.
Inherently each partner interaction is specialized in terms of communication transport, document exchange formats, and quality of service requirements. As a result, the framework for B2B integration must be both flexible and scalable and should allow for the shared management of the relationship at the hub and the partner/participant layer. Community integration is realized when the trading hub provides management access and visibility across the community to the hub and participant constituencies.
Traditional B2B solutions have been of two basic varieties: VAN-based offerings built on FTP/File Transfer EDI communication interchanges and point-to-point solutions for Internet-mediated XML-based document exchange. In both cases, the integration is predicated on point-to-point connections--each connection configured, implemented, and managed separately. These solutions provide only a limited ability to enable partners to provide community management and have not provided global visibility into hub operations. Additionally, the effort required at the hub to manage these communities in the face of technology, economic, and business changes becomes nearly impossible. More important, both of these solution architectures promote a ready-fire-aim mentality that results in a reactive approach to building and managing trading partner relationships.
Community integration provides a foundation for scaling trading communities into the hundreds and thousands of participants. By providing filtered visibility for partners into hub operations and an integrated approach to alert/exception management for both the hub and the partner community, this document exchange architecture enables shared operational responsibility across...
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