'Jupiter' Roadmap Solidifies

The beta release of BizTalk Server 2004 is the first step in a plan to combine BizTalk, Commerce Server, and Content Management Server (CMS) into a unified e-commerce offering, code-named Jupiter, to be rolled out over the next two years. Microsoft is positioning BizTalk as the “foundation” layer that solution-specific products like CMS and Commerce Server will build on. It also incorporates a development environment based on Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) that will serve the full Jupiter suite and will improve performance, manageability, and standards support in the product. Despite this positioning, however, the company has provided few details about any real product integration.

Jupiter Phase One: BizTalk

Although Microsoft’s long-term plan for Jupiter is to integrate BizTalk, Commerce Server, and CMS, the first phase is a revamp of BizTalk that focuses on improving usability of the product for developers and IT workers.

BizTalk is designed to automate intercompany business processes, such as purchase order exchanges between trading partners, and enable intracompany enterprise application integration (EAI) scenarios, such as connecting a company’s warehousing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Such functionality allows businesses to exchange information among systems with incompatible data formats and communication protocols.