Connect to SMB shares from Sterling B2B Integrator hosted on Unix / Linux

For Sterling Integrator hosted on Unix/Linux OS, there is no direct capability to exchange files with Windows Network Shared folders.

The recommended solution from IBM for this is to use a samba client on the Unix/Linux machine and mount the windows network shared folder as a persistent filesystem, thus making it available to read/write files from using the Sterling Integrator built in Filesystem Adapter.

This model tends to be less sustainable when we have a high number of network shares that are needed to be accessed, and there is frequent change / additional network shares - as this would require frequent modifications to the underlying host OS configuration (e.g. continually adding new mount points for additional network shares).

We are looking for a way to connect directly from a Sterling Integrator Business Processes to the remote Windows network shared folders to push or pull files, using SMB3 protocol (in order to ensure the encryption of the traffic).

We are looking into the possibility of creating either a custom java service or using some external jar library to call some library functions to perform this. There are open source libraries that offer some varying support for SMB3 (JCIFS and SMBJ libraries) and there is a commercial library (JNQ from Visuality Systems) which claims to be SMB3 compatible.

It would be ideal if IBM could create a new type of Client adapter & related services to directly connect to network shares using SMB and put/get files.