Harmony eDelivery Access facilitates the exchange of digitalised data between public administrations, private businesses and citizens, at national level and across borders, in an interoperable, secure and reliable way. There are various implementation models that can facilitate this, and each has its pros and cons, as presented in the next sections. The implementation models are based on the decentralised four corner (mesh network) model whereby Harmony eDelivery Access participants can utilise an access point, a SMP, and the dynamic discovery model to interact reliably and securely with other domain participants. It is important to recognise that, in all implementation models, the infrastructure is only a means to achieve connectivity; standardised data exchange interoperability between participants is the ultimate goal.

National Access Point

In the national eDelivery access point model, the National Authority of an EU Member State implements and maintains a single centrally-managed AS4-compliant access point, and if required, also a national SMP. In other words, the National Authority is both a participant and a service provider in one or more eDelivery policy domains. Potentially, the National Authority can also be a software provider if they decide to implement their own access point software and/or plugins for specific eDelivery policy domains.

The National eDelivery access point may be registered to multiple existing cross-border policy domains, such as PEPPOL, EESSI, Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS), and the Single Digital Gateway (SDG), etc. This means that organisations that want to join an existing policy domain can utilise the national access point instead of having to set up their own private access point. This approach is also easily scalable since it can accommodate many participating organisations.

Policy Domain Specific Model

In the policy domain specific model, a single organisation within an EU Member State maintains a policy domain specific access point and all other organisations requiring access to that specific domain may use that access point. In this scenario, the organisation owning and maintaining the access point acts as a domain hosting provider for the other organisations. If required by the policy domain, the organisation maintaining the access point could also maintain the SMP. The policy domain specific model can be used in multiple existing eDelivery policy domains, for example, in PEPPOL and in EESSI.

Organisation Specific Model

In the organisation specific model, each organisation has its own access point, and optionally its own SMP. The organisation specific access point and SMP can also be hosted by a commercial service provider.