How the portal is different
In a traditional IT system, different parties collaborate by signing in to the same application and updating shared information. This is difficult to do well. There are challenges around data ownership, securing the system, and account and user management. Using a single application means that the overall collaboration follows a "hub and spoke" pattern, in which one organisation owns the collaboration capability and all the data, and other organisations can only collaborate with that central organisation.
The portal approach supported by Metrici is different. Instead of having a central application in a single account to which all parties must have access, it is built around shipping requests between parties in different accounts, and accompanying those requests with sufficient process information to allow the parties to respond in a meaningful manner. This separation clarifies data ownership, and makes security, account management and user management easier. It also allow for parties to collaborate more freely, without all collaborations having to be owned by one central organisation.
How the portal works
In Metrici portal solutions, collaboration involves two main entities: channels and workers.
A channel provides a secure connection between two parties. It is different from a service call because it is bidirectional and because it is secured using key pairs, rather than requiring each party to be able to sign in as a user that the other party recognises.
The collaboration follows a process. However, the process is shared between the parties, and each process is represented by a process worker (or simply "worker") in each party. The process is created by one worker, known as the owner, and then the channel invoked to create a matching worker at the partner. Once created, the workers for a process are independent of each other, except that they can use the channel to communicate with each other.