MBN Process Flow

The Microsoft Business Network (MBN) facilitates business-to-business transactions between trading partners.

Shown here is a simplified ordering transaction between a manufacturer (Company A) that uses Great Plains (GP) and a small parts supplier (Company B) that processes orders using a manual process.

(1) Company A creates an electronic purchase order based on historical information stored in its GP system, using Excel 2003 with the MBN plug-in provided by MBN 1.0.

(2) Using Excel or Outlook 2003, Company A pushes this purchase order to servers hosted by the MBN via the Unified Mailbox server located on-site (a copy of the order is stored in either MSDE or SQL on the local mailbox).The order is transmitted to these servers as an XML document via Web Services.

(3) The order is stored on the MBN hosted server until Company B, the recipient of the order, connects to MBN and polls for and retrieves its documents using Outlook 2003. Retrieved documents are copied into Company B’s local mailbox.