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 infos like a description, contact information, address, ... and every other information (specific to you) that you want to store with your partners.
- Assign automatically partners to the messages processed in your environment.
- Extract partner infos directly from the messages processed in your environment.
- Make searches, or get statistics based on your partner (ex: give me all the invoices sent to Colruyt).
- Be compliant to GS1.
Partners and gateways are different concepts. The Partner is really the 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 xxx@mypartner.com", 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 setup an Email gateway IN orders@mycompany.com 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.