Feature

Community integration elevates collaborative commerce to a new level of integration between enterprises. XML-based document exchanges between companies impose new challenges on organizations building a B2B community integration solution.

In the past, traditional interenterprise solutions have fallen short of market expectations for community integration due to scalability issues, lack of document visibility across the trading community, and minimal partner participation in community management. To solve the tough challenges of XML-based document exchange, new integration solutions must address these requirements to provide an optimal foundation for trading partner collaboration.

This article discusses the concept of community integration and offers an architectural overview of how WebSphere Business Integration Connect can enable the rapid implementation of trading communities.

What Is Community Integration?
Community integration is about extending integration beyond the enterprise. It defines a document exchange framework that optimizes business processes across enterprise boundaries. Within organizations, there are numerous inter-enterprise relationships with external partners, some manual and others automated. Over the last 15 years, EDI has been established as a proven foundation for automating these relationships. The emergence of XML document standards such as RosettaNet, CIDX, and others has enabled the evolution of an open communication framework for interenterprise integration. However, providing an XML document exchange for these relationships does not provide community integration in itself.

Inherently each partner interaction is specialized in terms of communication transport, document exchange formats, and quality of service requirements. As a result, the framework for B2B integration must be both flexible and scalable and should allow for the shared management of the relationship at the hub and the partner/participant layer. Community integration is realized when the trading hub provides management access and visibility across the community to the hub and participant constituencies.

Traditional B2B solutions have been of two basic varieties: VAN-based offerings built on FTP/File Transfer EDI communication interchanges and point-to-point solutions for Internet-mediated XML-based document exchange. In both cases, the integration is predicated on point-to-point connections - each connection configured, implemented, and managed separately. These solutions provide only a limited ability to enable partners to provide community management and have not provided global visibility into hub operations. Additionally, the effort required at the hub to manage these communities in the face of technology, economic, and business changes becomes nearly impossible. More important, both of these solution architectures promote a ready-fire-aim mentality that results in a reactive approach to building and managing trading partner relationships.

Community integration provides a foundation for scaling trading communities into the hundreds and thousands of participants. By providing filtered visibility for partners into hub operations and an integrated approach to alert/exception management for both the hub and the partner community, this document exchange architecture enables shared operational responsibility across the community. This shared management focus allows the hub to rapidly add processes and partners to the community while at the same time reducing the overall incremental cost by partner to operate the trading community.

Community Integration and WebSphere Business Integration Connect
WebSphere Business Integration Connect is a community integration solution that was launched via the partnership between Viacore and IBM. Viacore is a service provider offering a comprehensive suite of community integration services for private trading communities. The initial component of WebSphere Business Integration Connect embodies WebSphere software and Viacore's Business Tone Services.

As an example, a major U.S. electronics distributor embarked on a major initiative to align a complex supply chain. The organization needed to quickly implement a private trading network to exchange real-time business processes with its suppliers and customers. This initiative required the synchronization of external document exchanges with internal business processes to support integrated order management, forecasting, and supply-chain planning. By utilizing a community integration framework from Viacore the company successfully implemented an integration solution providing collaborative management and transaction visibility across the trading community. The use of Viacore's BusinessTone solution allows the organization to react more quickly to exceptions, shortages, and trading partner issues and, as a result, these factors drove increased customer satisfaction enabling a more proactive real-time organization.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect is a Java-based software component architecture that was developed in three editions to meet the needs of different-sized businesses:

• Express is designed for small to medium-sized businesses that want to integrate small trading communities with an intuitive, Web-based integration solution. The solution leverages AS2 and HTTP standards for transmitting documents securely over the Internet.
• Advanced Edition enables the creation of larger trading communities that require more sophisticated community management tools. It is ideal for trading communities that will start small and grow over time. The Advanced Edition enables integration over numerous transports and offers a rich set of tools for deep community integration.
• Enterprise Edition is the solution for deploying large trading hubs with support for unlimited connection definitions. The Enterprise Edition shares the same core technology as the Advanced Edition, differing only from a licensing perspective.

Advanced Edition and Enterprise Edition - an Architectural View
WebSphere Business Integration Connect 4.2 is implemented on the embedded version of the WebSphere Application Server (v5.0.2) and inherits all of the functions of the WebSphere Application Server. WebSphere Business Integration Connect provides support for standards-based transports (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, FTP, JMS/WebSphere MQ), message protocols (RNIF 1.1, RNIF 2.0, AS1, AS2), and a wide range of payload formats (XML, RosettaNet, cXML, EDI, Binary/Raw Payloads, SOAP/HTTP/HTTPS, and cXML). SOAP integration includes support for both RPC and Document Styles and uses the mediation/proxy support functionality found within the IBM WebServices Gateway to coordinate and manage internal/external service endpoints.

Examining the product from a document perspective (see Figure 1), there are five basic processing layers that control document flow. Inbound documents (external communication) are handled via a network/transport management layer. Following document receipt, additional message format processing is performed, which includes message format-specific processing, packaging/depackaging, and/or content validation. WebSphere Business Integration Connect allows for validation (using XSD or DTD definitions) and document normalization (via XSLT) integration. After validation and normalization, the document can be processed into other message formats. As the final step, the document is made available for delivery into the hub via HTTP/HTTPS, JMS, or file-based integration. The end-to-end management of the software platform is provided by the event/alert notification layer and the management console, which provides transaction visibility to the hub as well as trading partner participants.

From an architecture perspective, WebSphere Business Integration Connect consists of three major components:

• Receiver (REC): The Receiver provides the inbound message listener service and initiates the document processing flow.
• Document Manager (DOC): The Document Manager is the main processing engine and is responsible for document routing, state management, message format packaging, delivery management, and logging, as well as validation and normalization functions.
• Community Console (CON): The Console application is a Web-based J2EE application for the operational management of the community hub.

All three components run in separate WebSphere Application Server instances providing container management, as shown in Figure 2. The use of WebSphere Application Server as the foundation for the product enables WebSphere Business Integration Connect components to be deployed on separate servers. This architectural feature facilitates deployments to meet high-end performance requirements as well as support for custom high-availability/failover requirements.

The decoupled architecture is supported through components' interactions with the database, shared file storage, and messaging system. The database holds the community metadata, validation documents (known as "guidelines"), message history (nonrepudiation), process state management history, and system/document exchange event data. The shared file service is responsible for physical storage and management of the actual documents. The messaging system provides the event service that enables components to communicate with each other. As a result of this component architecture, a Receiver never talks directly to a Document Manager. This decoupled architecture allows an organization to establish multiple receivers and/or multiple document managers depending on load and performance requirements. The ability to implement distributed topologies additionally provides architectural flexibility and allows the product to be configured to support complex, multilayered extranet/DMZ environments. Figure 3 shows a possible configuration using the Split Server topology.

Document security is enabled via encryption/decryption of payloads utilizing PKI standards to secure and validate the authenticity of documents. From a document exchange perspective, WebSphere Business Integration Connect enables the hub to restrict document interactions and SOAP operations to specific trading partners.

From an external access perspective, transport-layer security provides both server-based and client-based certificate authentication at the level of the receiver. Internally, the security integration within WebSphere Business Integration Connect utilizes an access control permission model to configure and enforce user/developer access rights within the Community Console. Partner administrators registered into the system can create user accounts for their organizations as well as groups to provide differential access to specific target roles.

Support for high-availability solutions is fully enabled. Support for highly available Receiver and Console components requires network dispatch services. Document Managers fully support placement on different machines without the need for additional clustering software. Cluster Fault-Tolerant Solutions (e.g., Linux [Red Hat and SUSE] AIX/HACMP, Sun Clusters, and Windows solutions) can be used as well to support high availability. Figure 4 shows the Pod-based solution deployment architecture, which can be used to support active-active configurations to support high-availability functions as well as load balancing.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect enables retry processing at the transport and the process levels. For transport-level retry, the hub will attempt to send a document a configurable a number of times with a configurable retry interval between attempts. Failure to complete the message delivery within this set range of attempts results in quiescing the outbound gateway and persisting the messages to a configured gateway message queue. When the gateway is activated, documents flow in a FIFO order from the gateway message queue. Process-level retries occur according to the specific business protocol (such as RosettaNet or AS2) and are configurable by partner and process. Based on a defined number of attempts and a defined retry interval, process retries continue until the message is acknowledged and/or appropriately responded to as per the protocol. In the event of a transport or process-level retry, hub and participants are notified via the alert management facility.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect provides integration with enterprise applications via JMS, HTTP and HTTP/S POST, SOAP, and file-based interactions.

It is optimized to work with WebSphere Business Integration or WebSphere Application Server offerings but is flexible to work with other middleware products as well.

Organizations can deploy the product with WebSphere Business Integration or WebSphere Application Server offerings. As an example, a new customer order could trigger an event via a WebSphere Business Integration Adapter and the subsequent routing to the WebSphere Business Integration Server. The WebSphere Business Integration Server hosts business processes that drive integration with other enterprise applications as well as interactions with external trading partners. The customer order could, for example, result in an inventory shortage, and an automated interaction with a partner might be needed to provide an available-to-promise date to the customer. During WebSphere Business Integration Server processing, the integration process can issue a request/reply call via WebSphere Business Integration Connect to the supplier.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect also provides a complete solution for EDI integration. Using WebSphere Business Integration Connect for transport integration (e.g., AS2 and FTP), traditional EDI processing can be enabled via WebSphere MQ integration with WebSphere Data Interchange or via file-based/message-based integration with alternative existing legacy EDI transformation packages, e.g., Harbinger/Inovis, Gentran, and others. This approach allows XML-based document exchange solutions to directly co-exist with traditional, time-tested EDI solutions.

Internal integration packaging can be invoked with or without transport-level attributes. Transport-level attributes are used to support additional automated routing of the document. Both HTTP and JMS attributes are formatted/managed as x-aux fields (defined in XML) for message/transport information, e.g., sender_id, receiver_id, process version, protocol, instance_id, and other fields. The WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker provides direct integration to message queues. Integration with WebSphere Interchange Server requires the WebSphere JMS Adapter V 2.3 (or higher) to format/parse the attribute information.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect ships with an extensive set of predefined exception events to enable alerts to be automatically raised during hub operations and notifications to be sent to multiple parties at both the hub and participant levels. From a community integration perspective, the Community Console provides a Web-based interface to provide community visibility into the event history and document exchange interactions. The Community Console gives hub managers an aggregated view of the activities of the community, allowing organizations to pinpoint "weak spots" in the community. Through this Web-based interface, community participants are provided a secure, searchable, Web-based view of their specific exchange activities and provided the ability to update partner-specific information, including profile information as well as participant users and group metadata. The Community Console also provides the interface for the administration of the hub including creation and maintenance of partner profiles, certificate management, and hub administration/configuration tasks. Figure 5 shows a screenshot of the Web-based Community Console.

Summary
Interenterprise integration requirements are fluid and dynamic, which imposes unique requirements on the implementation and operation of trading ecosystems. The need to manage these architectures more proactively is positioning community integration solutions as the core requirement for building trading communities. Providing event and transactional visibility to the community managers and the community participants, trading community benefits can be realized more rapidly.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect enables community integration regardless of transport, data format, and trust model. With the WebSphere Business Integration Connect technology, customers can scale from a small trading community consisting of 3-5 partners to a complete trading community consisting of tens, hundreds, and thousands of trading partners based on a WebSphere Application Server foundation. The product leverages JMS for WebSphere Business Integration connectivity and offers HTTP as well as file-based integration solutions as well.

WebSphere Business Integration Connect 4.2 Platform Support
WebSphere Business Integration Connect Advanced/Enterprise 4.2 currently runs on Intel platforms. The software runs under Red Hat Linux AS 2.1. The WebSphere Business Integration Connect Advanced/Express 4.2.1 release in December will support IBM pSeries (with AIX 5.2) and Sun SPARC (Solaris V8). Additionally, the 4.2.1 release will support SUSE LINUX ES V8 and Windows 2000 on Intel platforms.

For the 4.2 WebSphere Business Integration Connect Advanced/Enterprise release, the recommended Intel architecture is a 2GHz Intel Xeon processor with 300MB available disk space for application and additional disk space as needed for document storage. As discussed in the article, additional servers can be added for capacity and/or redundancy - multiserver installations require implementation of a shared file system to support distributed document access.

Software requirements for WebSphere Business Integration Connect Advanced/ Enterprise include:

• Database: DB2 8.1 FP 2 or Oracle Database Server, Version 9.2 with Oracle JDBC thin driver (Oracle support is with the 4.2.1 release)
• WebSphere MQ, v5.3 or later
• Web Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer, 5.0 or higher; Netscape, 6.0 or higher for Community Console access
• Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) server for e-mail alert delivery and SMTP-based message delivery

WebSphere Business Integration Connect Express 4.2 requirements are as follows:

• 1.4 GHz or faster Intel Xeon processor
• At least 512MB of Random Access Memory (RAM)
• At least 100MB of available hard disk space
• Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, with Service Pack 3 installed
• Microsoft Internet Explorer, 5.5 or higher or Netscape, 6.0 or higher for Express Console access
• A Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)-based e-mail relay server for delivering e-mail alerts

Note: WebSphere Business Integration Connect Express 4.2.1 will also provide support for Red Hat Linux AS V2.1 and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server V8 with SUSE LINUX, kernel 2.4.

WebSphere Data Interchange
In 2001, more than 2 trillion U.S. dollars in transactions were traded via traditional EDI architectures. EDI is established in 95% of Fortune 500 companies, and many of these enterprises have been reluctant to extend this EDI solution into XML-based implementations. As a result, there is a requirement for a robust EDI interchange solution, which is parallel with the WebSphere Business Integration Connect technology.

EDI integration is enabled through the use of WebSphere Business Integration Connect to provide a transport architecture and WebSphere Data Interchange to provide the EDI transformation solution. WebSphere Data Interchange is a data translation application supporting EDI standards (e.g., X12, EDIFACT, UCS, VICS, Tradacoms, and others) and XML formats and operates on multiple platforms including Windows 2000, AIX, and z/OS. The main components of WebSphere Data Interchange include:

• WebSphere Data Interchange Client, which runs on Windows 2000. This is used to create and deploy maps, import EDI standards, and add trading partner EDI profiles.
• The Data Translation application (The WDI "engine"), which transforms application data to EDI (ANSI X12, EDIFACT), XML, and non-EDI formats (user data) providing an any-to-any mapping solution. The Data Translation engine can run on Windows, OS/390, z/OS, and AIX.

Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the other members of the worldwide product team (including Steve Nowland, Lyle Larson, Doug Hillary, Dave Mulley, Brian Wilson, and many other contributors), the WebSphere Business Integration Connect development team (including Ashutosh Arora, Rayne Anderson, Raja Das, and Pat Keane), and the Viacore team (including Tony Curwan, Jeff Peters, and Eric Nelson).