BizTalk Server's Place in Microsoft's E-Commerce Lineup

BizTalk Server will be one of three major offerings in Microsoft’s electronic commerce strategy. The others include Commerce Server, for business-to-consumer commerce, and the bCentral hosting service for small businesses. BizTalk Server is effectively the next version of the Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP), a feature of Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition. The CIP is a set of libraries and tools for developers building business-to-business commerce applications, with a particular emphasis on applications that use XML-formatted documents. BizTalk Server adds several major features, including:

• A new user interface that allows a user to set up simple application-to-application interchanges with minimal programming.
• Support for two EDI message formats (ANSI X12 and UN/CEFACT EDIFACT), in addition to the BizTalk Framework’s XML message format.
• Support for new document transport protocols, the most important of which is the Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) reliable message protocol. BizTalk