Partners

A ‘Partner’ in Link, is a company or an internal system that sends and/or receives messages through Link. 

In Link, there can be two different types of partners: internal and external. An internal partner is an endpoint (typically of an application) within your organization. External partners are your business partners that you are exchanging data with.

Note that it also possible to categorize a partner as a "Proxy partner". This is relevant when you are communicating with external partners through a broker or a VANS operator. You can read more about this topic in the Proxy partners article.

In this part of the user guide you will learn how to create, manage and search for partners. Partner management is a big topic in Link since many of the vital functionalities for achieving a high level of reusability for you integrations are rooted in optimal configuration on the partner level. The Partner detail page is a must-read for any Link user.

One of the most important tasks when creating a new partner is to get the identification mechanism right. In many cases, you will have an endpoint that receives documents coming from lots of different partners, and in this scenario Link will determine the sender partner via the content of the document. As you probably know already, there are many different standards for identifying a business partner (e.g. GLN, DUNS, VAT etc.) - these are called "Identification types" in Link, and it is important to get your partner identification correctly configured - otherwise you risk that Link will be unable to determine who are the senders of these documents. You can read more about how to manage this in the Identification types chapter.

Let's get started. Hover your mouse cursor over the Partners menu item in the left hand menu to see the available options.

Search

Click this to open the 'Partner Search' page. From there you will be able to find and edit existing partners including adding Partner tags to them.

New partner

Press this to start creating a new partner. This is done via the 'New Partner' page. 

Import partners

Click here to import a list of partners from another Link solution. A pop-up will be displayed, allowing you to select a file on your local hard drive and then import it. You can read more information about this in the Import / and export of partners articleconfiguration article.