We created our own smaller IDOCs based on the standard IDOCs DEBMAS (customer master) and CREMAS (vendor master) because we only distribute "global" data (our own definition of global data - e.g. complete address and tax fields, payment data; classification; but no fax or telephone numbers)
Here we defined a serialization group, that holds e.g. CREMAS and ADRMAS and CLFMAS
further we activated change pointers for those IDOCs, whenever a change (or creation) is made in the central system a job then distributes this master data to the satellite systems.
Please search SCN, there are many blogs and documents and wikis about ALE and distribution of data between SAP systems