About Activator

Activator provides organizations with a secure, scalable gateway for B2B collaboration. The unified framework helps establish relationships with trading partners, transact business over the Internet, and integrate with back-end systems. The gateway provides flexibility in connecting to partners and legacy systems using widely used protocols, transports, and integration methods. Activator enables you to organize and automate the flow of electornic documents between participants located both inside and outside your enterprise network.

Activator is implemented as a single end-point solution. The application's user interface integrates gateway management, monitoring and metrics into one view.

Features and services

Activator provides the following features and services in support of exchanges between participants.

Support for transport protocols

In the Activator user interface, administrative users configure Community and Partner objects to specify the participants in message exchanges. Administrative users can then select the message protocols and transport protocols that support these exchanges. Additionally, administrative users can define application pickups and application deliveries to specify patterns of interaction with the various applications in the trading community.

Support for trading exchanges

Activator supports the following trading exchange formats and protocols:

AS4
EDIINT AS1, AS2, AS3
OFTP (V1 and V2) over TCP/IP, X.25, and ISDN
RosettaNet RNIF (V1.1 and V2)
ebXML ebMS (V2)
HL7 MLLP (V1 and V2)
cXML (V4)1
Web Services (SOAP/REST)
X.400 over X.25 and TCP/IP (X.420 and X.435 profiles)
HTTP, HTTP/S, Staged HTTP Web Servlet
Axway Transfer CFT, and PeSIT
FTP, S/FTP, FTP/S
JMS, IBM WebSphere MQ
WebDAV
Secure email (via SMTP)
File System
WebTrader - WebTrader is a browser-based interface for mailbox-based exchange of files over secure HTTP. Non technically trained end users can send and receive documents, and manage copies of these exchanges from a user-friendly interface.
Software Development Kit for custom protocols

Note

CXML V4.0 protocol is currently in beta status. (Limited tests have been done. Available upon request only.)

Support for security protocols

Activator supports the following security protocols:

SSL 2.0, 3.0
TLS 1.0 - 1.2
SSH 2.0 (client authentication)
S/MIME
PGP
Certificates (X509, PGP) with CRL, CSR, CEM, and OCSP support
FIPS
NIST 800-52
Encryption: RC2, RC4, DES, 3DES, AES
Signature: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256
Algorithms for key exchange: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1, diffie-hellman-group14-sha1, diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1.

Message services

Activator provides the following message-handling services:

Integration with back-end applications
Message identification based on one or more exchange attributes, standards, identifiers, or individual content.
Multiplication (duplication)
Message routing
Message handling can be extended with optional processing of inbound or outbound messages based on metadata attributes and actions. The trading engine enables you to set up conditions to:
- Copy messages to parties other than the sending or receiving party
- Re-route messages from one partner to another
- Prohibit re-routing of messages
- Reject messages
- Perform custom processing using your own Java class
- Generate notifications
Message handling involves performing message actions. Message actions are triggered by single or multiple conditions, which are a combination of attributes and operators. For example, you can specify that whenever a community sends a message to partner A, a copy is sent to partner B.
Message actions can be applied to inbound and outbound messages. For inbound messages, message actions are applied after a message has been validated, unpackaged and parsed, but before the payload is sent to a back-end system via an application transport. For outbound messages, message actions are applied after a document has been picked up from the backend, but before it has been packaged.

Trading partner management

Activator provides the following trading partner management services:

Community definitions – A community represents your local way of grouping trading partners. It defines your organization’s internal processes for handling messages. It also defines how your community expects to receive messages from partners. The local information is used by your system to set document back-up options, tune system performance, and integrate with back-end systems. While these settings are significant to you, they are not relevant for your partners.
Ramping, in-Life, and decommissioning management.
A registration wizard helps members of a community generate partner information for trading. This functionality is for partners who want to trade via AS1, AS2, ebXML, or WebTrader. The wizard prompts a user to supply the information Activator needs to build a valid partner.
Security certificate management – Activator offers true security by providing authentication, confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation of documents. The trading engine uses state-of-the-art cryptography to ensure the security of the documents that are exchanged over the Internet.
Role-based access – Users and roles enable administrators to add and manage ranges of user permissions. Roles define the permissions users have for performing tasks. Roles can be defined with few or many permissions. Each user should be assigned at least one role, although it is possible to assign multiple roles to a single user.

Security services and operations

Activator provides the following security-related features:

Signing – The Activator trading engine supports digital signatures. Signing is a mechanism by which a message is authenticated, proving that the message is effectively coming from a given sender.
Encryption – The Activator trading engine uses a combination of public-private key encryption (asymmetric encryption), and symmetric key encryption. This hybrid system uses the best characteristics of each method and minimizes the shortcomings of each. It follows the widely adopted S/MIME standard for securing messages.
SSL authentication – The trading engine optionally allows certificates to be used for authenticating the identity of trading partners. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol authentication provides an added layer of security to trading relationships.

Visibility

Activator provides the following visibility-related features:

End-to-end visibility – There are a number of ways to monitor system activity. Methods are available through the user interface and log files. The user interface methods are easier to use and understand than the log files, which are designed for software developers or advanced users. The user interface has tools for monitoring various types of system activity.
Alerts/Events – Each product generates events and alerts that aid in tracking abnormal or unexpected behavior across the system. Alerts and events are written to log files.