Manual

This manual describes how to publish your participants’ data on ion-SMP.

You can do this by creating one or more endpoints, creating one or more participants, and then assigning which participants are reachable through which endpoints and which document types they can receive.

Overview of sections and terms

Access point

An access point is a server or service that can send and receive documents on the PEPPOL network. It can support multiple transport types (such as AS2 or AS4), and be reachable through several URLs.

Endpoint

An endpoint is a specific URL for a specific transport type to send documents to an Access Point. An access point can have multiple endpoints. For instance, the Simplerinvoicing Test Tool access point is reachable for AS2 on the endpoint https://test.simplerinvoicing.org/as2, and reachable for AS4 on the endpoint https://test.simplerinvoicing.org/as4_prod.

Information about endpoints also includes its public PEPPOL certificate, technical contact information, and service support dates.

Participant

A participant is a trading entity that sends and/or receives electronic documents on the PEPPOL network. The main information is the identifier by which the participant is reachable, such as a GLN number or a Chamber of Commerce number. This identifier is the starting point of the lookup process, and is the main key by which the participant can be found on the network.

Participants also have business cards associated with them; there must be at least one business card, with the (company) name of the trading entity, in order for the participant to be published, but you can add additional (company) names to the business cards, add other information, such as a website URL and a contact email address. Additional information is not used in the SMP directly, but it will be used when publishing the participant’s information in the PEPPOL Directory.

You can define and publish on which endpoints your participants are reachable, and which document types (such as PEPPOL BIS v3 Invoice, or SI-UBL 2.0 CreditNote) they can receive. You can specify this for each participant individually, or you can specify an Endpoint Profile to manage the endpoints and document types for multiple participants at once.

Finally, you can specify whether to publish the participant in the SML (the production PEPPOL network), the SMK (the testing PEPPOL network), and the PEPPOL Directory (the directory service for the PEPPOL network).

Endpoint profile

Endpoint profiles are sets of endpoints and associated document types.

Instead of specifying which document types your participants support on which endpoints, you can also specify a specific endpoint profile, which in turn provides that information.

This makes managing your participants a lot easier than individual configuration: support you have a single endpoint, and all your participants support the exact same document types. If you update your service to support an additional document type for all your participants, you only need to update the profile and it will be applied to all the associated participants. When managing the document types for your participants individually, you would have to update them one by one.

SML

The Service Metadata Locator (SML) is the centrally managed service where participant identifiers are published. The SML points sending access points to the correct SMP, where they can find the information about the receiving access point. The SML serves the PEPPOL production network, and this is where you need to publish your participants when they are ready to process business documents.

SMK

The SMK is the same as the SML, but for the testing network. Participants published here are NOT reachable on the production network. This network is intended for testing only.

PEPPOL Directory

The PEPPOL Directory is a directory service for the PEPPOL network. This is a searchable directory where business cards of participants can be published. Publishing your participants in the PEPPOL Directory is optional, but highly advised, as this makes it easer for potential new participants to find information about their suppliers and customers, and whether they are connected to the PEPPOL network, thereby providing more incentive for them to connect to the network too.