Collaboration Profile 

Use

In a collaboration profile you can do the following:

·        Model the units that you want to address as the sender or receiver of a message

·        Define the available communication channels for the inbound and outbound processing of the messages

Addressing Senders and Receivers

You have the following options for addressing the sender or receiver of a message:

·        Communication Party (party for short)

·        Service

The XI message protocol supports the addressing of senders and receivers on two levels: The first level corresponds to a company unit, the second to a technical or semantic unit within a company unit or company. You represent the first addressing level with the Communication Party object, and the second by the Service object.

Depending on the scenario, you can define the sender and receiver of a message very flexibly with these objects. The options are listed in the following table.

Types of Addressing and Typical Usages

Addressing	Typical Usages
Party with assigned services	You use this type of addressing when configuring collaborative processes in which whole companies communicate with each other. You then use a communication party to represent each company. A service represents a business or technical entity within a company. In cross-company processes, the companies involved usually provide a variety of services for communicating with other companies. See also: Configuring Cross-Company Processes
Services without party	You use this type of addressing when configuring processes in which the system landscape is known to you. The definition of communication parties is not mandatory. This enables you instead to specify the known business systems and integration processes (defined as business system services or integration process services) directly as either the sender or receiver of a message. In this way, you can address individual business systems directly and thus create receiver determinations and interface determinations very easily. See also: Configuring Internal Company Processes

Note that it may sometimes be necessary to use communication parties when configuring internal company processes, for example in the case of IDoc communication. If the IDoc partner is not of type logical system, you must map the IDoc partner to a communication party in the Integration Directory.

Communication Channels and Adapter Configuration

You define the details for the inbound or outbound processing of messages in the communication channel object. You can access the adapter configuration directly from the communication channel (see Adapters).