Why encrypted connections need certificates at all, built up in layers: what an attacker on the path can do, direct trust between two parties, why that stops scaling, and how CA chains solve it. Then TLS as a wrapper around any protocol — HTTPS, FTPS, LDAPS, MQ, Connect:Direct Secure+ — names and why SAN is now mandatory, key usage and client authentication, key stores against trust stores, and the failures you will actually meet.
How partners actually connect, and what goes wrong with it. Built on the four questions every transfer has to answer: who opens the connection, how each side proves who it is, what is protected, and how you know it arrived. FTP's two connections and the firewall problem, what TLS fixes and what it makes worse, two chapters on SFTP — whose SSH trust model shares nothing with certificates — HTTP as a transport rather than a file protocol with REST and SOAP on top of it, AS2 and the signed receipt that closes the loop, Connect:Direct and what becomes possible when both ends run the same product, then a map of the rest: Aspera FASP, IBM MQ, OFTP2, PeSIT, EBICS, SWIFT, Peppol and AS4. Ends with choosing, onboarding and diagnosing.
Working confidently on the servers Sterling runs on — getting on over SSH, navigating, reading and searching logs without hurting a busy box, permissions and why a file can be 'not found' when it is plainly there, disk and memory, editing configuration safely, and a method for investigating an incident that does not destroy the evidence.
Enough relational database knowledge to work on B2B Integrator with confidence, to know what is in the database and what is not, and to tell what the evidence actually says when somebody reports that the database is slow. Tables and keys, SELECT and JOIN, NULL and the queries it quietly breaks, what an index costs as well as what it gives, transactions and what commit really promises, the blocking chain that stops work unrelated to the row that is locked, reading an execution plan well enough to know a query is wrong, and the platform-specific part — connection pools, latency, growth and RAC.
XML is the substrate of B2B Integrator — ProcessData, business process definitions and most map output are all XML. Covers document structure, well-formedness against validity, namespaces and why they cause most silent XPath failures, XPath context and selection, XSLT's declarative model, escaping and encoding faults, and how to choose between XPath, XSLT and a map.
What a business process is and why it is written in XML; the structure of a BPML document; ProcessData as the workflow's memory; services, adapters and the contracts between them; choice, repeat and onFault; the check-in and versioning lifecycle; reading a failure in BP Monitor; and the design habits that make a process survivable in production.