Collaboration Profile 

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)

More information: Defining Communication Parties

●      Communication component (component for short)

More information: Defining Communication Components

The 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 Communication Component 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 communication components	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 communication component represents a business or technical entities within a company. In business-to-business processes (or cross-company processes) the companies involved usually provide a variety of communication components for communicating with other companies. More information: Configuring Business-to-Business Processes
Communication components independent of a party	You use this type of addressing when configuring processes in which the system landscape is known to you. This is usually the case in application-to-application processes. The definition of communication parties is not mandatory. This enables you instead to specify the known business systems and integration processes (defined in Integration Directory as business system components or integration process components) 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.

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.

You can assign multiple communication channels to one party or one communication component within a collaboration profile.

You define which communication channel exactly is to be used for exchanging messages between a sender and receiver in the collaboration agreement for the sender/receiver pair.

More information: Defining a Communication Channel