Trading Partner Collaboration & Sharing

Within your account, you have the ability to share and collaborate with other companies by granting them access to one or more of your trading partners.

Sharing trading partners is great for accomplishing tasks like:

• Speeding up testing cycles
• Working together to diagnose data issues
• Planning and coordinating go live activities.

When you share a trading partner, you are granting access to some, but not all of the information within that trading partner.  Here's what the other company can and cannot see.

Getting Started

To get started with sharing a trading partner, follow these steps:

1. Clicking on the settings button in the navigation bar
2. Choose Trading Partners
3. Click Add A New Trading Partner or pick the existing trading partner you want to share
4. If you are creating a new partner, give your trading partner a name and click save
5. On the trading partner settings screen, find the Sharing section and click New
6. On the next screen enter your trading partner's Company Short Code (click here for instructions on how your trading partner can find their short code) 
7. Click Save

To remove a company's sharing, go back to the trading partner settings page and click remove on the row with the company name.

Logs & Files

You might wonder why we don't allow the other company to see the Logs & Files screens.  This is a lot of useful data, that is very helpful for troubleshooting a transaction. 

The reason is that the files generated by your system often contain a lot of data that you aren't passing along in the data you finally send to your partner. 

For example, a freight forwarder might send a full shipment file into Chain.io that includes both the buy and sell costs for local delivery.  That forwarder might use this file to generate an invoice upload for their customer.  If the customer had access to the files tab, they'd be able to see both the buy and sell costs in the raw data.  

For that reason we make sure that the data in the files & logs is kept private to your company.

Sharing

If you'd like to give a partner access to the logs and files for a single execution, click the Share button inside that execution.

You can also share all logs and files with a partner by checking the Auto Share checkbox when setting up your flow.  If you edit an existing flow, auto share will only be enabled for flows executed after you check the box and save the flow.