By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Oct. 17, 2005

The following is a sidebar accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.

BizTalk is generally used to automate workflow in one of two scenarios:

• Business-to-business (B2B) processes, such as handling purchase orders from trading partners
• Enterprise application integration (EAI), such as synchronizing or exchanging data between a company's warehouse and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

In these scenarios, BizTalk serves as a messaging and processing hub between two or more external business systems. A messaging component in BizTalk controls the exchange of messages (typically business documents, such as purchase orders) between systems, and an orchestration component executes the workflow associated with those messages. For example, such workflow could involve converting messages to the data format expected by a target system and determining the conditions under which messages are sent to that system. (The term orchestration is roughly synonymous with the term system workflow as used in WWF.)

In addition to these capabilities, BizTalk 2004 introduced Human Workflow Services (HWS), a feature that added rudimentary human workflow automation capabilities. HWS uses BizTalk's orchestration and messaging components to manage human workflow business logic and exchange information among workflow participants. HWS also allows human-oriented client applications to interface with BizTalk's orchestration and messaging components, and includes an administrative tool for managing workflow applications and development tools to help developers build workflow applications.

The introduction of WWF does not signal the demise of BizTalk, despite apparent technical and conceptual overlaps. Instead, according to Microsoft, WWF and BizTalk are complementary. BizTalk will continue to be Microsoft's solution for B2B and EAI scenarios, while WWF serves as a technology foundation for BizTalk and other Microsoft products. For example, the company has indicated that WWF will replace BizTalk's orchestration engine in a future version of the product, likely the version following BizTalk 2006 (BizTalk 2006 will ship in the first half of 2006); however, BizTalk 2004 and 2006 applications may need to be rewritten to run on the future BizTalk platform's WWF-based engine.

Finally, product documentation released with the BizTalk 2006 beta (released July 2005) suggests that HWS will be supported in BizTalk 2006 but will not be rolled forward into future versions of BizTalk. Whether or not BizTalk will continue to support human workflow is unknown; however, if future versions of the product do support human workflow, this support will be built around WWF and not HWS.