• Illustration: BizTalk Server Architecture

Microsoft's recently released BizTalk Server 2000 allows a company to integrate disparate internal computer systems as well as facilitate business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce between systems on the Internet. BizTalk Server defines and manages the end-to-end interactions associated with receiving, validating, transforming, processing, and transmitting business data between different applications.

Why is integrating applications so challenging? Typically, developers working on the integration aspect focus on how to exchange data between the applications and pay less attention to the business rules and processes that must govern the interaction. BizTalk Server helps business analysts and developers address both of these issues.

First, BizTalk Orchestration can simplify the encoding and maintenance of the business rules that govern the interaction of the applications by allowing business analysts to define and manage those rules in graphical form, and to keep them in a centralized location separate from either application. Second, BizTalk Messaging can simplify the physical interconnection of the applications by supporting Internet-based protocols and by providing tools to manage the formatting, translation, security, and transmission of the messages that contain the business data.

Much of the power of BizTalk Server comes from the fact that BizTalk’s Orchestration and Messaging allows programmers to connect applications using graphical and wizard-based tools rather than traditional programming tools, without having to touch either application.

Orchestration

BizTalk Server Orchestration Designer is a Visio-based tool that allows business analysts and developers to create and implement a business process. The business analyst begins by using graphical objects to represent any concurrent, asynchronous, and branched steps or actions, and then binds the entire business process into a transaction. Developers then use messages, which are managed by the BizTalk Messaging Service, to connect the process steps or "actions" with the software components that will implement them; for example, an action could be to accept a purchase order, which would involve receiving a message with the purchase order data from the purchaser’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. Orchestration provides additional flexibility by allowing developers to define generic implementations; for example, a generic order-shipping process could be resolved to different physical shipper implementations based on criteria in the order that are evaluated and processed at run time.

A complete orchestration drawing contains a graphical representation of a business process, definitions of the business documents that are passed as messages, the flow of the messages, and error-handling and recovery actions. The Orchestration Designer compiles the completed representation into a file based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), called an XLANG "Schedule," that the Orchestration Service executes.

The Orchestration Service interacts with the BizTalk Messaging Service to exchange messages (consisting of data from the business documents) with Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ), Windows Scripting Host, or COM components; these, in turn interact with the application that processes the data.

While Microsoft positions Orchestration as a mechanism to manage business processes for BizTalk Server, it could easily be adapted to provide process-related functions for .NET-based Web services or for eventual integration into tools such as VS.NET and into future versions of Windows. Orchestration would then be available to solve many business and system management problems that could benefit from being graphically represented as actions in a process, and then connected to the components that implement the process.

It should also be noted that the term workflow typically refers to managing business process information, but Microsoft has introduced a new word—orchestration. Microsoft has tended to use the term workflow to describe systems that delineate the steps that must be taken, the dependencies that must be enforced, and the approvals that must be obtained while routing documents (such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets). Therefore, in Microsoft terminology, workflow solutions typically involve highly centralized systems that are responsible for routing entire work items from one participant to the next for either review or approval.

In contrast, BizTalk Orchestration is broader in scope: the applications being interconnected are autonomous peers, and data is being exchanged in a format the receiving system can process, rather than simply being contained in a fixed format within a business document. Additionally, an interchange being described via Orchestration may require several back-and-forth exchanges of different business documents to complete the transaction and record the status of the process.

Messaging

BizTalk Messaging makes it easier to exchange business documents among different applications by accepting a business document from one application in its native form, converting it to the form the second application requires, and then securely transmitting it to the second application.

BizTalk Messaging breaks this process into two logical steps, represented by Channels (a set of properties that configure BizTalk Messaging Services to process a document) and Messaging Ports (a set of properties that configure BizTalk Messaging Services to transport documents to a specified destination using a specified transport service).

When BizTalk Messaging Services receives a document, it identifies the appropriate Channel, parses the document and converts it into XML (which BizTalk Server uses to represent data internally), validates it against a schema, and transforms it into the form the next application will require to convert it from an inbound to an outbound business document. Then the Messaging Port associated with the Channel defines the destination, associates the document with the appropriate transport service, applies any security, and finally creates the XML-based document envelope for transmission.

BizTalk Server includes three tools to help manage BizTalk Messaging:

• BizTalk Messaging Manager, a graphical user interface for the creation and management of Channels, document definitions (schemas), envelopes, Messaging Ports, and trading partner organizations (which are business analyst-created sources and destinations for business documents).
• BizTalk Editor, to create and edit schemas in XML Data Reduced (XDR) format that Channels must use to correctly parse and validate the business documents being exchanged.
• BizTalk Mapper, a tool to generate XML style sheets (XSLT) that Channels use to transform inbound to outbound business documents.

BizTalk Messaging can receive business documents using the Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP and HTTPS), MSMQ queues, delimited or positional flat files, and Distributed COM (DCOM). It can send messages via SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, COM, and MSMQ. (For details on how the Orchestration and Messaging Services interact, see the illustration "BizTalk Server Architecture".)

Deceptively Easy?

The graphical nature of BizTalk Orchestration Designer and other BizTalk Server tools makes it appear that it is easy to deploy complex, automated processes for tying together applications. With BizTalk Server, business analysts and developers do not write code unless a customized component is needed (vendors of complex applications such as the ERP systems will be supplying components that work with BizTalk Server). Instead, they use wizards or graphical symbols to define the inputs and outputs (business documents), the business logic (as XLANG Schedules), and communication properties.

Just as Visual Basic made it easier for developers to create Windows applications, BizTalk’s graphical tools make it easier for business analysts and developers to define the messages and processes that allow the interconnection of multiple applications. The graphical tools will not turn a business analyst into a developer or magically transform a developer into a business analyst, but in the hands of the right person, BizTalk Server tools can shorten the time needed to define and implement a solution.

Customers may find that a team approach works best with this product. Business analysts will have to define the business processes, and business analysts and developers will have to develop the necessary XLANG Schedules that encapsulate the process, as well as the XML schemas and style sheets that describe and transform the business documents. Developers will need to build any scripts or components required for implementation of the processes. IT administrators will need to be involved to correctly size, install, configure, and manage the BizTalk, SQL, and Windows 2000 Servers.

Customers with neither business process nor development experience may need to use consultants to effectively use BizTalk Server.

The Relationship of the BizTalk Framework and the BizTalk Server

The BizTalk Framework defines a message format that uses standard and emerging Internet technologies to consistently represent and transmit XML-based business documents. (For more information on the BizTalk Framework, see "BizTalk Framework Defines Business System Interaction".)

BizTalk Server 2000 is a BizTalk Framework-compliant server, and as such can process business documents that comply with this framework, but it is not restricted to documents that comply with the framework. BizTalk Server can be used to integrate applications and exchange documents based on a variety of formats, including BizTalk Framework 2.0, XML, ANSI X.12 and EDIFACT EDI, and RosettaNet.

Availability and Requirements

A 120-day evaluation of BizTalk Server 2000 is available for download from the Microsoft Web site. The retail product will be available in Feb. 2001.

BizTalk Server ships in two versions:

Standard Edition is targeted at small and medium-size organizations and has support for integrating up to five internal applications with up to five external trading partners, such as exchanges or digital marketplaces. The Standard Edition does not support clustered deployments. The suggested retail price of BizTalk Server 2000 Standard Edition is US$4,999 per CPU.

Enterprise Edition is targeted at large organizations, trading hubs, and digital marketplaces and can simultaneously integrate many internal applications with many trading partners over the Internet. BizTalk Server 2000 Enterprise Edition supports multiple processors and clustering. The suggested retail price for BizTalk Server 2000 Enterprise Edition is US$24,999 per CPU.

BizTalk Server 2000 requires Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server with Service Pack 1 or later, and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 (with Service Pack 2) or SQL Server 2000, neither of which is included.

Microsoft Visio 2000 SR-1a (included) is required to use the BizTalk Orchestration Designer.

Resources

The 120-day evaluation version of BizTalk Server 2000 is available at www.microsoft.com/biztalk/productinfo/evaluate.htm.

More information on the data interchange aspects of BizTalk Server can be found at www.microsoft.com/technet/biztalk/biztalka.asp.

For more information on orchestration, see www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/biztalkorchestration.htm and www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/messorchWP.htm.

For information on deploying BizTalk Server, see www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/depconWP.htm.

For information on operating BizTalk Server, see www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/operationsWP.htm.