A trading network is a group of organizations that have agreed to exchange business documents. Participants might include strategic partners, buyers, suppliers, and marketplaces (for example, Ariba Network), and are referred to as trading partners. Business documents typically include purchase orders, order statuses, purchase order acknowledgements, invoices, and other domain-specific business documents.

webMethods Trading Networks enables your corporation to connect to other organizations to form a business-to-business (B2B) trading network. Through Trading Networks, your organization can exchange business documents with the partners in your network to relay production information. The business documents can be in any format that is recognized by two partners, such as XML or flat file. Trading Networks is also the base through which webMethods products support numerous eBusiness Standards (eStandards) such as RosettaNet, EDI, ebXML Messaging Service, SWIFT, FIX, and CIDX.

My webMethods is a Web-based user interface framework that supports administration and monitoring user interfaces for webMethods products. The Trading Networks user interface in My webMethods lets you perform all Trading Networks tasks.

Administrators use permissions to control the data you can view in My webMethods and the actions you can take against the data. If you do not have certain permissions, My webMethods might not display pages, buttons, or other user interface controls required to perform the actions described in this guide. If a procedure instructs you to perform an action that is not available, ask an administrator to grant you the permissions needed to perform the action.

The Trading Networks database stores all information about the trading network, such as partner information, types of documents to process, processing actions, and log activity. When you monitor Trading Networks assets, you can work with the Trading Networks production database or the Trading Networks database to which production data has been archived (that is, the Trading Networks archive database).