B2B File Transfer Concepts

Files.com lets you exchange files with customers, suppliers, and other businesses while working with the systems and requirements each one brings. A supplier may send invoices from an accounting application, a customer may require purchase orders in a particular format, and a data provider may make its nightly feed available only through SFTP. Your job is to make those arrangements work reliably and to know what happened when a delivery is late or rejected.

Business-to-business (B2B) file transfer has more than 30 years of established practice behind it, with career specialists, dedicated teams, and training and certification programs. B2B integration and Managed File Transfer (MFT) teams bring together expertise in connection methods, identity checks, data processing, and recovery. That work turns a file copy into a business process that both organizations can depend on.

At Files.com, our aim is to give you everything you need to become an expert in B2B file transfer. We bring the underlying concepts and practical judgment together in this Book so you can understand a partner's requirements, recommend an approach, operate the exchange, and resolve an uncertain result without assembling a reading list from other sources.

This section focuses on automated file exchange with another business. If your work stays within your organization or involves a person transferring files manually, start with Automated Workflows or Interactive Use.

Files.com on Both Sides

When you can influence the arrangement, our first recommendation is for both businesses to use Files.com and connect through Connected Sites. It is worth proposing this to a new trading partner before designing an exchange around a traditional file-transfer protocol.

Each organization keeps its own Files.com site. One business shares folders through a Partner relationship, and the other business's Site Administrator approves the connection. Both can then use their own automated workflows with those files, within the permissions granted by the sharing business.

Files.com manages the connection, transport encryption, and service identity, leaving you to concentrate on access to the files and the business process. You avoid setting up a separate protocol connection and coordinating its keys, certificates, and network requirements. Transfer, processing, access controls, and activity records come together on both sides through Files.com's File Orchestration Platform.

Compatibility Comes First

An established trading partner may already require a particular delivery method or file format. In that case, use what its systems accept. Files.com supports those arrangements so the other business can keep working with its existing tools.

If the partner is not using Files.com and you have a choice of connection, prefer a Files.com CLI, SDK, or application connector suited to the system doing the work. Our connection recommendations explain the alternatives when a standard protocol is needed, including how the recommendation changes when speed is the priority.

Protocol, key, certificate, and network requirements arise as you connect to other systems. Files.com runs the hosted transfer services, but the two businesses still need to agree on the exchange and configure the systems they operate. Part of the expertise is recognizing which work Files.com already handles for you.

We recommend protection proportional to the data and its business consequences. For most routine exchanges, our native connections, HTTPS API, or SFTP provide sufficient encryption alongside appropriate authentication and permissions. Additional protection needs a concrete purpose: AS2, for example, introduces certificate and message-handling work that we recommend against taking on for a new exchange without a specific need. Our AS2 recommendation explains that tradeoff.

A Shared Delivery Agreement

Even when Files.com handles the connection between both sites, the businesses need a shared understanding of what they are delivering. That agreement covers which files are expected, when they become ready, how the receiving application uses them, and which acknowledgment reports success.

Consider a supplier placing a completed invoice file in a shared folder for your workflow to deliver to accounting. The transfer can succeed while accounting rejects an invoice. Both sides need to recognize missing invoices, rejected records, duplicates, and corrections, with a team responsible for each result.

Responsibility follows the work. The sender knows when its source file is complete, Files.com provides the transfer records, and the receiving application reports whether the records were usable. Keeping those responsibilities clear helps the right people resolve a late or rejected delivery.

Trading Partner Onboarding explains how to bring that agreement together. To apply it in Files.com, use Partner File Exchange for the business relationships and folders, or Managed File Transfer for the design and operation of a recurring transfer.