Global WCF

This option was introduced with Hull & Outfitting 12.0.SP6.6 to improve the security of all Global communications. It is an alternative to the use of RPC which has been used in previous versions of Global.

It provides an interface to the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) as an alternative to Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) for network communications. As a result, Global can now exploit the security configurations provided by WCF, which is enabled and configured by modifying values in XML configuration files.

The following security benefits are now available:

• Transport Layer

  • Apply security to either the connection (ideal for connected networks), or individual messages (ideal when sending messages over the internet)

• Bindings

  • Determine the low level protocol used, BasicHTTP (textual, unsecured), wsHTTP (textual, secured) or TCP (binary, faster, but cannot be validated)

  • Determines which ports to use for connections

• Encryption

  • WCF provides many encryption algorithms to protect data en route

• Encoding

  • Tied in with the binding, this determines how the message will be sent: text (slow), binary (fast) or Message Transmission Optimisation Mechanism (MTOM) which will send what it can in text, but will send binary data as binary (a combination of the previous two)

• Authentication

  • At the server side, the message is verified to be from a known source; at the client side, the message is sent to a known receiver. Messages can authenticate against a Windows account or via a certificate.

• Message Validation

  • Ensure that messages meet a known format by comparing against a Schema

Full details are provided in the Global WCF Configuration Guide. Other Global manuals have also been updated for 12.1.