4.6. Partners

The Partners are the entities that communicate via Babelway.

For example, when Babelway is used to transfer an invoice from Coca-Cola to Colruyt, the 2 partners involved in the communication are Coca-Cola and Colruyt. Coca-Cola is the sender or Partner IN. Colruyt is the receiver or Partner OUT.

Babelway allows you to :

• Define and manage your partners, including additional info like a description, contact information, address, ... and any other information you would want to collect about your partners.
• Assign automatically partners to the messages processed in your environment.
• Extract partner Infos directly from the messages processed in your environment.
• Filter message lists.
• Use partners to restrict access to documents.
• Be compliant with GS1.

Partners and gateways are different concepts. The Partner is really the business entity involved in the communication (typically a company), while the Gateway represents a technical way of reaching this partner (e.g. "send an email to address [e-mail]", or "Place files on FTP server of mypartner.com").

You can have multiple gateways to connect to the same partner (e.g.: invoices must be sent by email, while orders must be sent via FTP).

A simple gateway can also be used to communicate with multiple partners. For example, I could set up an Email gateway IN [e-mail] that all my clients are allowed to use to send me an order. In this case, the sender (partner IN) will just be written in the order.