Figure 3 illustrates a hypothetical scenario for the adapter for e-Mail. The illustration shows a cross-enterprise solution that enables trading partners to exchange business data via e-mail. The trading partners have chosen to exchange business data via e-mail rather than communicate across firewalls or send data via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
Trading partner A has an enterprise application generating business data. A WebSphere business integration adapter polls for events in the application, generates business objects, and sends the business objects to an integration broker. The integration broker is configured to forward the business objects to the adapter.
The adapter uses a data handler to convert business objects to a specified data format. The adapter composes an e-mail message, attaches files containing the converted data, and sends the message across the Internet to mail host MailServer1.
Concurrently, a legacy application generates e-mail messages containing business data formatted as text strings, and sends the messages to mail host MailServer2.
Trading partner B configures the adapter to poll both MailServer1 and MailServer2 for new e-mails. When new e-mails arrive, the adapter checks the MIME type of each attachment, calls the appropriate data handler to convert the attachments to business objects, and sends the business objects to the integration broker.
As Figure 3 shows, trading partners can create new mailboxes at host mail servers and use the adapter to execute business processes over the Internet. For enterprises with firewalls between the Internet and local networks, or between internal department networks, the use of e-mail enables data exchange without requiring tunnels through firewalls. The adapter for e-Mail is also useful when applications are locked for direct access but can exchange data by means of e-mail.