• Sidebar: New Connected Systems Division Merges Groups
• Illustration: Business Activity Monitoring Portal

Management and monitoring will be a major focus of BizTalk Server 2006, the next version of Microsoft's message-based application and business-to-business integration platform. The planned improvements will come without any major functional or architectural changes, unlike BizTalk Server 2004, which delivered major technical updates to the product. Released as a beta in July 2005, BizTalk 2006 allows Microsoft to address limitations in a number of ancillary features introduced in 2004, but some features, such as Human Workflow Services (HWS), will not be enhanced and will likely be cut in future releases.

BizTalk Mediates Business Processes

BizTalk Server is a business-logic processing platform that is used for enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business (B2B) integration. For example, a BizTalk solution could coordinate a Web-based application that captures purchase orders with a back-end financial application that processes and tracks those orders.

The product includes a run-time engine containing two main subsystems, a messaging subsystem and an orchestration engine.

The messaging subsystem enables the exchange of messages, which encapsulate business data or documents such as purchase orders, between BizTalk Server and external systems. Software components called "adapters" allow BizTalk to communicate with external systems; message-processing software (called "pipelines") translates messages into and from BizTalk's native language (XML) and validates their structure in the process.

The orchestration engine executes the logic (specified in a special XML syntax and called an "orchestration" in BizTalk parlance) associated with a business process. For example, an orchestration could evaluate an equipment requisition order that was received by BizTalk's messaging component. It could test whether the dollar amount of the requisition fell within the spending limit of its originator and, depending on the outcome of the test, the orchestration subsystem could trigger the messaging subsystem to construct and send a purchase order to a supplier or a rejection notice to the requisition's originator.

BizTalk's run-time engine is supported by an array of design and programming tools that business analysts (business users familiar with an organization's processes) and developers use to define and code the message processing and exchanges and the business logic that make up an end-to-end business process. The resulting code is referred to as a BizTalk application and is executed by the BizTalk run-time engine.

(For more information on BizTalk's features and architecture, see "BizTalk Server Engine Reworked" on page 3 of the April 2004 Update.)

BizTalk Server is a product of the Connected Systems Division, formed in July 2005, which combines Microsoft's Business Process and Integration Division and Distributed Systems Group under Senior Vice President Bob Muglia. (For more information on the new division, see the sidebar "New Connected Systems Division Merges Groups".)

Simpler Setup and Administration

BizTalk Server 2006 addresses several deficiencies in its predecessor that complicated the setup and administration of BizTalk Server and BizTalk applications.

Updates include the following:

Streamlined installation and configuration. Reworked setup utilities in BizTalk 2006 should ease the process of getting BizTalk up and running. BizTalk Server's software prerequisite list is formidable: the product requires the installation of Windows (Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, or Windows XP), Internet Information Services (IIS), Visual Studio, and SQL Server, in addition to a lengthy list of redistributable Microsoft components (including specific hotfixes to the .NET Framework, SQLXML, and MSXML). With BizTalk Server 2004, administrators had to install all software prerequisites manually before installing BizTalk. Although administrators will still install Windows, IIS, SQL Server, and Visual Studio manually, BizTalk 2006's setup program can automatically install other required components.

Furthermore, a redesigned configuration wizard in BizTalk 2006 improves progress and error reporting and offers administrators more granular control of product and feature installation. For example, the wizard provides administrators a streamlined default option for basic, single-server installations and detailed custom configuration options for advanced installations.

Improved application packaging simplifies the process of deploying, configuring, and managing BizTalk applications. BizTalk applications are made up of a set of artifacts (orchestrations, message schema, and message processing logic, for instance) that specify a BizTalk business process, such as the exchange and processing of purchase orders recorded on a company's Web-based ordering application and fulfilled by its back-end distribution system. BizTalk 2006's management console organizes artifacts into separate containers for each application, addressing a limitation in BizTalk 2004. Specifically, BizTalk 2004's management tools provide no information about how artifacts relate to applications that use them. This can complicate administrative tasks (such as updating an orchestration) in BizTalk 2004, particularly for deployments with many applications, since there is no way to easily determine which artifacts correspond to a given application.

In addition, BizTalk Server 2006 administrators and developers can export and package the artifacts associated with an application into Windows Installer (.MSI) files, which can then be distributed and installed on other servers using Microsoft's standard installer technology. BizTalk Server 2004 employed a much more limited, specialized tool (called SEED) for application distribution and installation.

Better Business Activity Monitoring

Introduced in BizTalk 2004, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a set of tools, services, and SQL Server databases that exposes business-related statistics, metrics, and events associated with a running application. For example, a loan officer could use BAM to view information about loan applications as they move through an approval process orchestrated by BizTalk Server. BAM also takes advantage of SQL Server Analysis Services to aggregate and filter data—for example, a loan underwriter could view the number of loan applications awaiting approval by loan type and by region.

BAM gets several updates in BizTalk 2006, including the following:

Web access to BAM information. BizTalk 2004 required Excel for accessing, viewing, and updating the live data collected and stored by the BAM infrastructure. BizTalk Server 2006 expands client access, introducing a new portal that provides Web-based access to BAM data. The BAM portal includes an Activity Search page that helps workers query back-end BAM databases and an Aggregations page allows workers to view aggregate data.

(For an illustration of the BAM portal, see "Business Activity Monitoring Portal".)

Notifications. In BizTalk 2004, BAM users could pull information about running BizTalk applications using Excel; however, notifying users of important BAM events or conditions required developers to write custom code. With BizTalk Server 2006, BAM uses SQL Server Notification Services to push information to users, giving them fast access to time-sensitive events without requiring developers to write custom code. The BAM portal supplies a page called the "Alert Manager," where users define alerts that trigger when specific events occur; when an alert triggers, users that have subscribed to the alert are notified by e-mail. For example, a user could create a BAM alert that fires if the processing of a major order placed by a key customer is delayed for a specified amount of time.

Visibility into message pipelines. In BizTalk 2004, BAM captured data from BizTalk orchestrations but required custom development to gather data from BizTalk applications that did not use orchestrations and only used BizTalk message processing. (Message-only BizTalk applications are not uncommon: for example, many BizTalk applications simply map and pass messages among applications with incompatible data formats). In BizTalk 2006, BAM can also gather statistics from message pipelines, giving business users visibility into message-only applications without requiring developers to write custom code.

Developers Get Tweaks

BizTalk 2004 introduced a Visual Studio—based integrated development environment that encompassed and updated the stand-alone BizTalk developer tools of earlier versions.

BizTalk 2006 updates this environment for Visual Studio 2005 and includes several other tweaks and additions, such as the following:

Wizard for defining flat file schema. A new wizard should speed the creation of schema definitions for flat files (previously a manual development process), which are a common means of exchanging data with many older or legacy applications. (BizTalk uses such schema definitions to convert between flat files and XML, BizTalk's internal data representation language.) To construct a schema definition for a flat file, developers run the wizard against an instance of a flat file message (a detailed employee record from a legacy human resources system, for example). The wizard helps the developer determine the record delimiters, data fields, and data types in the message. The output of the wizard is a baseline schema, which can be further refined using the BizTalk Editor, BizTalk's tool for constructing, editing, and viewing XML schemas.

Orchestration Designer zoom. The BizTalk Orchestration Designer is a graphical tool used to define the logical operations (such as decision branches or loop conditions), message transformations and exchanges, and their sequences, which together make up orchestrations. Orchestrations of even modest complexity become quickly cluttered in BizTalk 2004's Orchestration Designer. A zoom in/out feature in BizTalk 2006's Orchestration Designer fixes this limitation—developers can zoom out to see the entire orchestration or zoom in to focus on a smaller section.

Several new adapters. With BizTalk 2006, Microsoft will ship several new adapters for widely used protocols and technologies, which could help the company push BizTalk into new integration scenarios. For example, a Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) adapter will allow BizTalk 2006 to retrieve e-mail messages and their attachments from POP3-compliant e-mail systems, such as Microsoft Exchange or Sendmail. Another adapter, for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), lets BizTalk send documents to (and receive them from) WSS document libraries. While such integration scenarios were not precluded in BizTalk 2004, supporting them required businesses to create their own adapters or purchase them from third parties.

In addition, Microsoft will include adapters for the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) and the IBM MQ Series message queuing technologies in BizTalk 2006; previously, these adapters were sold separately.

Human Workflow Strategy in the Works

BizTalk 2006 focuses primarily on enhancing features and utilities peripheral to BizTalk Server's core engine. However, some important features did not get updated.

Perhaps most notable, BizTalk 2006 makes no changes to the product's Human Workflow Services (HWS) feature, a set of programming interfaces and services designed to help developers create BizTalk applications that involve human or noncomputerized steps or interaction (such as the review of a business proposal by a group of business analysts and executives). According to product documentation released with the BizTalk Server 2006 beta (and other documentation released by the company), HWS will be supported in BizTalk 2006 but will not be rolled forward into future versions of BizTalk Server. However, the company has indicated that a new workflow technology will provide HWS-like features in future BizTalk Server versions, and will provide the foundation of workflow features included in future versions of Windows. Consequently, developers should consider that applications built on HWS will not be compatible with future versions of BizTalk.

Availability and Resources

Microsoft released BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 1 in July 2006. The company plans to release BizTalk 2006 in the first quarter of 2006 but has not yet disclosed pricing details for the product.

BizTalk's home page is www.microsoft.com/biztalk/.

Customers can sign up for BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 1 at www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/bts2006beta.mspx.

For more information about the BizTalk Server engine, see "BizTalk Server Engine Reworked" on page 3 of the April 2004 Update.

BizTalk's developer tools are described in "New Tools for BizTalk Development" on page 13 of the July 2004 Update.

Details on BizTalk's Human Workflow Services can be found in "Human Workflow in BizTalk Server 2004" on page 16 of the June 2004 Update.