There are two approaches to securing automated interactions between members of a trading circle, both supported by new standards. Provisioning, or user administration, is an approach to access control that is used by virtually every company; SPML is a new specification that simplifies and automates multi-company provisioning. Federation is an approach to orchestrating security, wherein trust is brokered among the participating companies, and each interaction carries security directives; WS-Federation is a new language specification that defines the protocol for brokering trust and works in conjunction with the other specifications in the WS-Security family.