Although its shipping date slipped by a few months, BizTalk Server 2004 launched worldwide this month without backing down on any of its early promises.
ITWeb got an early briefing at last year`s Tech-Ed, where the talk was of ease of integration and more efficient interfacing with knowledge workers and developers.
"Our integration strategy strengthens incrementally with this launch," says Derek Kudsee, Microsoft SA solutions specialist.
BizTalk operates on Windows Server 2000 or 2003 and SQL Server 2000, but Kudsee says it integrates with heterogeneous operating platforms - the central tenet of a product that links different environments.
"With over 350 adaptors available at launch, we can integrate to any platform of any size, regardless of legacy status - from screen scraping on the mainframe to Web services integration into your ERP or CRM," says Kudsee.
The big idea
Kudsee says the main aims of BizTalk are to provide "operational efficiency, business process optimisation and information worker productivity". Firstly, it has been embedded into Visual Studio .Net, so that "any developer comfortable with VS.Net (and its associated languages, such as C#, VB and ASP.Net) will feel right at home opening a new BizTalk project in VS.Net," says Kudsee.
BizTalk projects compile into .Net assemblies and run as managed applications. This includes orchestration and "transformation mappings". Whereas previously, transformation scripting logic (needed to translate a source document into a target document`s content and structure) was primarily written in VB Script and interpreted at runtime, it must now be written in any .Net language, and compiled on the .Net framework, speeding up transformation between documents.
"This is hugely encouraging for EDI customers, for example," says Kudsee, "who have traditionally struggled to integrate their legacy x25-based networks to new IP-based networks because of the size of these documents, and the effort and hardware resources required to achieve this. Financial services with SWIFT messaging dependencies will love this, especially with our add-on product, the Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT.
"We`ve re-designed the orchestration engine completely, with the result that it performs up to 10 times faster than its predecessor."
BizTalk now also ships with Human Workflow Services, a framework in which to develop workflow solutions, making it easy to build out human-based workflow scenarios on a single integrated platform.
Operational efficiency is achieved through business process automation, he adds. An add-on template in Visio 2003 allows business analysts to model business processes and then give them to developers for import into the orchestration designer. This is possible due to support of the standard BPEL4WS (business process execution language for Web services). BizTalk also makes use of all Web services standards of the last two years through WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Group).
Information workers are more productive in a number of ways, he says. End-users can view the status and activities of a business process at any time through productivity tools like Excel. By using InfoPath forms, Microsoft`s XML-enabled forms environment, end-users can build XML-enabled forms. Forms are "consumed" by BizTalk, disseminated and published into multiple systems. BizTalk also enables single sign-on via Windows Server 2003`s SharePoint Services, meaning users can view data from multiple backend systems via a browser.
Better architecture
Kudsee says BizTalk 2002`s dependency on MSMQ - which has a 4MB limit on any one file at a time - has been "revised" via an architectural change. BizTalk now uses a "message box". MSMQT, a new adaptor, removes all size limitations and enables the processing of large document types.
Probably the most important improvement in the new platform is the implementation of a business rules engine. "Customers asked us for a mechanism whereby they could change their business rules without having an impact on the existing business process. Previously any change in business rules required a development effort inside the running orchestration and therefore recompilation and deployment," says Kudsee.
Microsoft has 3 500 BizTalk customers worldwide, and has already deployed BizTalk Server 2004 at South African customers in the financial services, retail, media and entertainment, hospitality and manufacturing industries.
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