B2B Advanced Communications concepts

B2B Advanced Communications provides dynamic functions that integrate with and complement the existing Sterling B2B Integrator product to optimize data exchanges with your partners.

B2B Advanced Communications gives you visibility into end-to-end data, flexible AS2 and AS4 messaging solutions, robust security controls and data security, and flexible options for deployment, configuration, and customization (including user exit capabilities).

Exchange concepts
An exchange is the transmission of data between organizations. Exchange profiles in B2B Advanced Communications facilitate secure exchanges between owner and trading partner organizations.
Visibility and monitoring concepts
Each exchange of documents between your organization and a trading partner is made up of one or more events. You view the events that take place in an exchange to validate message processing or to determine whether there was a problem with the message exchange. You can configure the system to use monitoring applications to interact with the event messages that are generated during exchanges.
User exit concepts
User exits provide an optional call to an external program. These user-provided functions can be called at specific points during the lifecycle of a message while it passes through the message flow. You can use a user exit to intercept the progress of messages through message flows without having to redesign the message flow. Also, user exits provide a mechanism to apply operational actions (such as auditing, authentication, or authorization) to deployed message flows at run time.
Security concepts
Security management controls secure partner communications, organization credentials, the use of digital certificates, and certificate update requests. B2B Advanced Communications provides a multi-layer approach to securing messages and other data.
Systems management concepts
Systems management functions administer important aspects of the system infrastructure, including HTTP and HTTPS servers, retry policies, thread pools, and other common system settings.
Thread pool overview
B2B Advanced Communications uses thread pools to manage concurrent tasks. A thread pool is a group of pre-instantiated, idle threads that stand ready to receive work. When many short tasks need to be done rather than a few long tasks, thread pool usage is preferred over instantiating new threads for each task. Using thread pools can prevent diminished system performance that is caused by creating many new threads. If you tune thread pool sizes, the server components can reuse threads. The reuse of threads eliminates the need to create new threads at run time to handle each new request, which can improve system performance.
Communications concepts
B2B Advanced Communications supports AS4 and AS2 protocols for secure and reliable exchange of B2B documents.
Globalization concepts
You can configure B2B Advanced Communications to use the language of your location. However, English is currently the only available language.
Centralized storage
The storage component supports secure, highly available storage and retrieval of binary data that is identified by an ID.

Parent topic: B2B Advanced Communications overview