In our use of BizTalk 2009 we do a lot of EDI transmissions. We often have third party groups, VANs, that supply AS2/EDI services to our partners. Because of this I have cases where two partners use the same AS2 settings, but have different EDI settings for each partner.
Currently in these cases I have three parties. One for each partner containing EDI information, and one for the VAN which contains the shared AS2 information. Currently I have two send ports that dump the partner EDI files to a file folder. These send ports are associated with the EDI parties. I then have a receive location that listens for any files in that folder, and a send port linked directly to the receive location's port name. This send port is linked to the AS2 party, and takes care of the transmission piece.
This seems a little less then optimal to me. Are there better practices out there? If nothing else I would really like to keep the messages to the BizTalk Message Box, and not write to the local file system. Is there a way to do this?
What architecture are other people using to solve this problem with using BizTalk?