These guidelines are intended to provide a baseline set of Match-Connect administration practices for all Match-Connect participants. Due to the critical nature of business operations facilitated via Match-Connect, it is expected that these guidelines will be followed closely and consistently. This should ensure the ongoing success of message exchange between Match-Connect partners.

• The Match-Connect system architecture is based on privacy and security by design principles. Deviation from these principles has to be justified, documented, and approved. Typically, a trade-off has to be made between privacy/security and overall system complexity.
• A Match-Connect administrator should respond to all Match-Connect-related inquiries within 24 hours (excluding weekends), regardless of the content of the inquiry.
• Inquiries that reference system problems (for example, problems with sending/receiving of messages) should be given high priority.
• Sufficient time and care should be devoted to development and testing when establishing a connection with Match-Connect. Close collaboration is often necessary between new Match-Connect partners and WMDA to ensure that business and system expectations are adequately met on all sides before exchanging Match-Connect messages in production environments.
• If a new Match-Connect partner does not want to implement the whole set of available message types, reasonable groups of message types should be implemented together. (TBD: reasonable sets of messages, also known as EMDIS implementation level.)
• Generally faxes and emails should be avoided in an electronic communication system. If they become necessary, it’s recommended not to mix channels in message groups. For example, if the TYP_REQ was in Match-Connect, the result should be in Match-Connect as well and not by fax/email (and vice versa). 

The implementation of the central part of the Match-Connect architecture (broker, central hub) is based on the following principles:

• No data of Match-Connect participants is kept after retrieval by the receiving hub
• No data (payload) of Match-Connect messages is changed
• Ensure integrity and traceability of the messages exchanged (for details see Chapter 6.0). 

The Match Connect system acts as a central broker of information exchange between registries participating in the Match Connect ecosystem, also called the central hub from here on.  The central hub bears the responsibility to:

• route information from the sending registry to the receiving registry and maintain information integrity
  • provide meta information to aid in the investigation of message failures or data synchronization problems
  • provide meta information for traceability 
• ensure the integrity of the data in the Search & Match Service
  • perform syntactic validation of the information (e.g. appropriate information structure, allowable values, valid dates, etc)

In performing these duties, the Match Connect system will inspect the contents of messages to determine who to route messages to and to perform basic validation.  This content is not intended to be reviewed by administrators of the system except in cases where this is required to analyze message failures or data synchronization problems.  The central system will never modify original message contents but additional meta information "blocks" will be added to ensure the receiving registry is aware of:

• Which registry sent the information
• What type of information is contained
• A message identifier
• A timestamp
• Any failed validations detected by the Match Connect system
• A sequence number to know if any message is missing.

The high-level message flow can be found in Chapter 5.