In this blog post you will find what do you need to check before you submit test documents to your business partners when using Peppol Exchange Service, as well as details about Peppol SMP and how can test and productive participants be distinguished in the Peppol network.
Peppol SMP (Service Metadata Publisher) is similar to an address book or business registry containing technical details of participants within Peppol network. The participants publish their receiving capabilities, such as supported document types and versions, in the SMP service.
There are two parts of this address book, one meant for test participants - SMK and another one meant to be used for productive participants - SML. A participant can be registered in SML, SMK or both of them at the same time. SMK is also sometimes called test SML.
There are several ways to indicate a test participant in the Peppol network:
If you send a document to a participant which is only registered in SML under their productive participant ID, your document will be forwarded to your business partner productive system and therefore it can be considered legally binding.
If you use the test environment of the service and want to send test documents which shouldn't be treated as productive, then you have to follow the steps bellow.
In any case you should mark all your test documents, for example with a Note text that specifies that the document has only a testing purpose.
This blog post only contains instructions for the outgoing process, if you want to run a complete test then I recommend to follow the End-to-end Testing post.
Please share your feedback and thoughts in a comment. If you have questions about SAP Document Compliance, you can post your question here.
Peppol SMP (Service Metadata Publisher) is similar to an address book or business registry containing technical details of participants within Peppol network. The participants publish their receiving capabilities, such as supported document types and versions, in the SMP service.
There are two parts of this address book, one meant for test participants - SMK and another one meant to be used for productive participants - SML. A participant can be registered in SML, SMK or both of them at the same time. SMK is also sometimes called test SML.
There are several ways to indicate a test participant in the Peppol network:
- By registering the participant in SMK. At the moment only a few access points use this approach (example: ZRE in Germany)
- By registering the test participant in SML, but having a different ID from the productive one, for example by adding a prefix or suffix to the productive ID. In the test environment of the Peppol Exchange Service the test participants are marked with the _TEST suffix.
If you send a document to a participant which is only registered in SML under their productive participant ID, your document will be forwarded to your business partner productive system and therefore it can be considered legally binding.
If you use the test environment of the service and want to send test documents which shouldn't be treated as productive, then you have to follow the steps bellow.
- Request a test participant from your business partner
- If the participant ID from point 1 contains a productive ID, for example a real VAT ID, then access the Participant Information page. Fill the Participant ID in the Identifier value and choose the SMK option from the SML to use dropdown.
- After you press the Show details button, ensure that the participant appears as registered in SMK. This should look like in the image below:
- Only if the participant is registered in SMK as shown in the image at point 3, you should go ahead and submit test documents to your business partner.
- You shouldn't simply submit test documents to a participant with a productive ID for which the SMK look-up is returning an error message as in the image bellow:
In this case you should contact your business partner and request a correct test participant or make an agreement that you are going to send test documents to their productive participant. - A participant registered for productive use - SML - has the following representation in the participant information:
In any case you should mark all your test documents, for example with a Note text that specifies that the document has only a testing purpose.
This blog post only contains instructions for the outgoing process, if you want to run a complete test then I recommend to follow the End-to-end Testing post.
Please share your feedback and thoughts in a comment. If you have questions about SAP Document Compliance, you can post your question here.
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