• Sidebar: Why BizTalk Server Is Necessary
• Illustration: BizTalk Server's Architecture
• Illustration: SEEDing Inter-Organization Integration
• Illustration: A Large-scale BizTalk Server Configuration

BizTalk Server 2002, in concert with two other Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server products—Application Center and Operations Manager—makes application integration easier. Gains come in areas such as deployment, application monitoring, and development of .NET-based XML Web Services.

BizTalk Server helps organizations make their internal applications work together and integrate their internal applications with those of their partners. (For more information on application integration, see the sidebar "Why BizTalk Server Is Necessary".) It integrates applications by acting as a specialized hub that connects disparate applications and passing messages among the applications. (For more details on how BizTalk Server works, see the illustration "BizTalk Server's Architecture".)

Improving BizTalk Deployment

BizTalk Server 2002 facilitates two specific deployment scenarios: first, administrators can use Application Center to manage clustered "farms" of BizTalk Servers within an organization; and second, it provides the SEED Wizard to make interorganization deployment easier. SEED is an acronym for Super Efficient and Effective Deployment, but it may be better to think of it simply as a way to "seed" deployment information.

Server Farms with Application Center

Organizations can run BizTalk Server on farms of servers to increase capacity and provide redundancy. However, in the past it was difficult and time consuming to create, test, and move BizTalk Server resources and custom counters (used to manage processes) into production, and ensure that the latest versions of these resources were deployed across the server farm.

BizTalk Server 2002 ships with an Application Center driver, which enables Application Center to deploy BizTalk Server resources and counters and ensure that the most recent versions of these objects are available on each BizTalk Server. (For more information on Application Center, see "Application Center Aims to Simplify Web Clusters" on page 3 of the Apr. 2001 Update.)

Connecting Partners with SEED

A typical use for application integration involves supply chains and trading relationships with multiple partners. Implementing the required technology requires extensive communication of information such as the document schemas and where documents are to be delivered for processing. Typically, this information is communicated by e-mail, and because of the detail involved and the need to ensure that the system works as planned, it can take several days to set up, configure, and test application integration before putting the solution into production.

BizTalk Server 2002's SEED Wizard allows one company (the initiator) to create a SEED Package containing all the information a trading partner (the recipient) needs to create the BizTalk Server resources, fully test the integration, and integrate the application with their own BizTalk Server. (For more information on SEED Packages, see the illustration "SEEDing Inter-Organization Integration".)

By using SEED, Microsoft’s own implementations of BizTalk Server with partners have been reduced from several weeks to a few days.

Improving BizTalk Management

To ease troubleshooting of the orchestration process, BizTalk Server 2002 exposes much more information about its inner workings via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interfaces than earlier versions. It can generate 900 new and enhanced WMI events, and also includes a BizTalk Server Management Pack, which contains predefined Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) rules and alerts for monitoring the most common BizTalk Server problems. In addition, a BizTalk "Custom Counter" WMI class allows the organization to build customized monitoring applications to address site-specific monitoring requirements. (For more information on MOM, see "Operations Manager Provides Crucial Infrastructure Support" on page 3 of the Sept. 2001 Update.) Using MOM to manage BizTalk Server allows an organization to both customize and automate this management.

(To see how an organization might deploy BizTalk Server 2002 with MOM and Application Center, see the illustration "A Large-scale BizTalk Server Configuration".)

BizTalk and the .NET Platform

Because BizTalk Server uses XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages for its internal data representation and document exchange and supports Internet protocols for receiving documents, BizTalk Server has always been able to expose existing applications as Web Services. BizTalk Server 2002 includes samples that demonstrate how to use Web Services with BizTalk Orchestration. It also includes the most recent version of the SOAP Toolkit, a set of tools and components for turning COM applications into Web services and Web service clients.

BizTalk Server 2002 also includes a toolkit for developing resources with Microsoft's new .NET development platform and Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) development environment. (See the Feb. 2002 Research Report, "The .NET Development Platform.") The toolkit includes sample code and documentation for writing adapters in VS.NET languages, such as C# or Visual Basic .NET. One of the code samples is a complete e-procurement tutorial that has been migrated to VS.NET.

These tools may steer customers away from problematic solutions, such as integrating BizTalk Server with the .NET development platform by using the COM interoperability features of the .NET Framework to wrap existing COM components or adapters so that they can work with the CLR. Such wrapped components are not managed by the CLR and could still leak memory, open security holes, or crash applications.

Availability and Resources

BizTalk Server 2002 is currently available in two editions:

The Enterprise Edition targets large organizations. It supports multiple processor and clustered deployments and costs US$24,999 per processor.

The Developer Edition provides developers and IT professionals with the tools they need to integrate applications and orchestrate business processes. Developers can create and test application integration within a development environment for later deployment to full production. Developer Edition costs US$499 per developer and is free with an MSDN Universal subscription.

BizTalk Server 2000 offered a Standard Edition, which targets small and medium-sized organizations and has support for integrating up to five internal applications with up to five external trading partners. It appears that Microsoft will offer this edition in the future, but pricing and packaging are still unknown.

BizTalk Server requires SQL Server and Visio, which customers must license as appropriate for their configuration. To take advantage of BizTalk Server 2002's Application Center-based deployment and management features, organizations will also have to license Application Center and Operations Manager.

Resources

For more information on BizTalk Server 2002, see www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.asp.

For more information on the BizTalk Server 2002 Toolkit for Microsoft .NET, see msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?URL=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/870/msdncompositedoc.xml.

For more information on Application Center, see www.microsoft.com/applicationcenter.

For more information on Operations Manager, see www.microsoft.com/mom.