Create Connections

Before you start exchanging data, create a connectivity agreement to establish secure connections with your partners. The MFT service offers you two types of agreements:

• Organizational
• Personal

Organizational agreements

An organizational agreement connects two organization accounts through shared inboxes specified in an agreement. You receive data from your partners in the inboxes you create and send data to the inboxes of your partners. Inboxes are represented as folders in your file system that you can use to structure and sort your data. For example, you can use an inbox to receive data of a certain type. This categorization helps you organize your data. The MFT agent automatically creates an incoming directory with sub-folders named after the inboxes you create.

Note Only an account administrator can create, update, and remove inboxes. If you do not have administrator permissions, contact your account administrator to get access to the required inboxes.

To use an inbox to receive data from your partner, you must share the inbox with the target partner. To do this, specify the inboxes you want to share in an organizational agreement. In the same agreement, your partner can share his/her inbox(es) to receive data from you. Only an account administrator can create organizational agreements, accept agreement invitations and provide other account users with the access to the inboxes to let them participate in the data exchange. For more information about how to send and receive data, see Data Exchange.

Use the MFT service web portal to create an organizational agreement with a partner. After the target partner accepts the agreement invitation, you can start receiving data from your partner using the inboxes specified in the agreement. You and your partner can update the agreement anytime and edit a list of inboxes to use for data exchange.

Personal agreements

A personal agreement does not require the creating and using of inboxes for data exchange. A personal agreement connects two users directly and allows them to exchange data. This means that only those users who have created a personal agreement can access the transferred data. Any user (including the account administrator) can create and accept personal agreement invitations. Any party of the personal agreement can remove the agreement anytime to stop exchanging data. The account administrator can view and manage personal agreements created by users of his/her organization account but cannot access the contents of the transferred data.