Collaboration Profile 

In a collaboration profile you can do the following:

●      Model the units that are to be addressed as the sender or receiver of messages

●      Specify the available communication channels for processing the messages

Addressing Senders and Receivers

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

●      Communication Party

●      Communication Component

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. The first addressing level is realized by the Communication Party object, and the second by the Communication Component object.

Depending on the application case, you can define the sender and receiver of a message very flexibly. 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 entity within a company. In cross-company processes, the companies involved usually provide a variety of communication components for communicating with other companies.
Communication component 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. Instead, you can specify the known business service directly as 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.

Communication Channels and Adapter Configuration

Use the communication channel object to define the details for inbound and outbound processing of messages. 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