A partner is an Activator object that represents a sender or receiver in a message-processing definition.
Just as you give a partner your community configuration profile to use as a partner profile, your partner exports a community profile to a file and sends it to you. You import this file as the partner's profile on your system. The imported partner definition consists of contact information and the message protocols and transports your partner supports for receiving documents.
For partners who do not use Axway software, you must manually create partner configurations on your system.
Partners can exist without being associated with a community, however partners must belong to a community for trading to occur.
Significant elements of a partner configuration are: