Improved Management in BizTalk 2006 Beta

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.