Overview of Creating Partner Profiles
Trading Networks administrators can create partner profiles in two ways:
Partner Administration page in
My webMethods. The administrator obtains details about the partner from the business user who identified the partner as a prospective trading partner. The administrator then enters that information on various
My webMethods pages on behalf of the partner. For information about creating a profile using this method, see
Creating Profiles.
Trading Networks provides standard fields for profiles. You supply these types of information in standard fields:
General information about the corporation, such as corporation name, address, and contacts
Information about how to deliver documents to the corporation
Certificate information for digital signing of documents, verifying digital signatures, encrypting and decrypting documents
You define external ID types for the types of identification used in documents that are exchanged in your network, and then specify the actual external IDs in profiles. For example, you could define the external ID type DUNS, and then in profiles, you could specify external IDs that contain the actual values of the D-U-N-S numbers in documents. Trading Networks uses external IDs to identify the sending and receiving partners within a document. For example, Trading Networks compares the value of the D-U-N-S number in a document to the external IDs in profiles. If it finds a profile with an external ID that matches the D-U-N-S number, it determines that the sender of the document is the partner with that profile. You can specify an unlimited number of external ID types. Each profile must include at least one external ID.
If you want to maintain additional information about your partners, you can define custom fields, called extended fields. For example, you might want to define extended fields for preferred shipping method, cost centers, or customer codes.
By default, many standard profile fields are required. When a profile field is required, all profiles on your system must have a value for it. You can make standard fields required or not required, and you can make extended profile fields required or not required.
You can associate profiles with partner groups. For example, you can create a partner group named Buyers to associate all of your partners who are buyers in your trading network. A partner can belong to more than one partner group. You can use partner groups in the sender or receiver criterion when matching processing rules to documents.