BizTalk Server to Skirt 'Oslo'

A new roadmap for BizTalk Server, Microsoft’s application integration and business-to-business product, calls for continued improvements without major breaks in backward compatibility. In particular, Microsoft has dropped plans to redesign BizTalk Server around new technology from a development project code-named Oslo. The new roadmap will cheer customers and partners who have invested in the current BizTalk Server product and will also benefit Microsoft’s BizTalk Server developers. However, plans for BizTalk Server releases beyond 2009 are still fluid, and the Oslo project has yet to unveil its technology and roadmap to developers.

BizTalk Server is Microsoft’s server product for application integration and business-to-business commerce. It includes a messaging engine that serves as a hub for application-to-application communication and a workflow system (called Orchestration) for programming business processes that cut across applications. BizTalk has built-in management tools, such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which enables organizations to capture and analyze status data from business processes, and Visual Studio plug-ins for coding custom integration solutions on top of the product. BizTalk Server also provides a large collection of components for specific types of solutions, including messaging adapters for connecting to specific applications; messaging support for electronic data interchange (EDI) standards in finance, healthcare, and other fields; and support for asset tracking and supply chain management with Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags.