Azure EAI & EDI Services

A set of experimental Microsoft-hosted cloud services offers some of the messaging capabilities of BizTalk Server, potentially with less infrastructure maintenance for the customer than running BizTalk Server on-premises or in virtual machines on Windows Azure. The services are collectively called Windows Azure Service Bus Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) & Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Services, formerly BizTalk Services. They offer application-to-application message routing and conversion similar to BizTalk Server.

Like BizTalk Server, the EAI & EDI services enable inbound and outbound messaging in a variety of protocols and formats, and routing between external systems and a company’s internal applications (using other Azure Service Bus communications services). The EAI & EDI services offer only a subset of the capabilities of BizTalk Server messaging; for example, they do not offer processing for the widely used U.N. EDIFACT EDI standard and provide a smaller (and different) library of message conversion functions. Furthermore, the EAI & EDI services do not include the Orchestration engine for scripting long-running business processes.