Quick Tour of Mailbox

Mailbox is a secure business document repository with a store-and-forward communication infrastructure. Mailbox provides facilities necessary to conveniently build B2B electronic commerce communities.

Mailbox provides a trading partner browser interface called the Mailbox Browser Interface (MBI). No special software is required when Mailbox is deployed to an electronic trading community. The MBI is secure and simple to use, requiring no special user training.

Although Mailbox can be used with almost any communication or B2B protocol service, such as EDIINT AS1, SMTP or HTTP, for convenience, it has been tightly integrated with AS2, the EDIINT service, and the HTTP/S communications adapter. You can configure a system to use Mailbox to stage documents for internal processing, while using the AS2 protocol for secure Internet-based document transport. This feature provides a scalable and functional alternative to the File System adapter with AS2.

Mailbox supports automated, scheduled, and manual processing of business documents using routing rules. Routing rules provide a powerful and easy-to-use mechanism for controlling document routing. Additionally, Mailbox is easily combined with business processes, document translation, B2B protocols, and back end system integration.

Business documents stored in Mailbox are called messages and can contain business content in any format such as binary, EDI, or XML. Each message is assigned an extraction policy that specifies the rules for extracting messages from a mailbox. For example, when you add a message to a mailbox, you can process the message immediately or at any scheduled time.

Mailbox provides a hierarchical, OS platform-independent business document repository. It therefore offers storage, organization, and management advantages over the use of a file system. The repository provides many capabilities including support for relative mailbox paths (virtual roots) and a dead letter mailbox. The repository also provides efficient document storage. For example, multiple mailboxes containing the same message share a single copy of the message.

A management user interface provides easy management of existing mailboxes and routing rules.