Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 09:07:35 -0700
From: "Burdett, David" <>
The very common use case which I think will apply to many businesses is
illustrated by the following diagram originally suggested by Chris Ferris:
....
In this example the BM MSH is an intermediary, yet, I would argue, A should
not need to know that it is actually dealing with an intermediary. It should
be transparent.
But then why does BM have to be an MSH at all? Instead, why not just
make BM an SMTP store-and-forward mailer, or the equivalent thing
using HTTP? In other words, consider BM to be operating at the
communication layer. Then it will really be invisible. And nobody
will bother to worry about CPA's to which it's a party: it doesn't
have to worry about CPA's at all. After all, you say:
The BM MSH does not "process" the
message in a business sense as it does not look at the payload.
Since it doesn't actually interpret the message, there's no need for
it to know the ebXML MS protocol at all.
Now for Commerce One. ONE of the (many) uses for ebXML that Commerce One has
is illustrated by the diagram below:
A
--------------
C1
------
D
--------
D
MSH
MSH
MSH
APP
|
--------
E
--------
E
MSH
APP
Note that, as far as use of MSH's are concerned, this is IDENTICAL to the
previous diagram except that Commerce One is providing the mailroom function
rather than it being inside party B. Also links are made to many different
parties (i.e. D & E), not just one (i.e. B).
But if it's still just passing the messages through without
interpreting them, the same point holds: don't consider it to be an
MSH.
