WWF and BizTalk Server

Many Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) concepts and terms mirror those of BizTalk Server, Microsoft’s main workflow product today. However, the two technologies are largely complementary and future versions of BizTalk will be built on top of WWF.

BizTalk is generally used to automate workflow in one of two scenarios:

• Business-to-business (B2B) processes, such as handling purchase orders from trading partners
• Enterprise application integration (EAI), such as synchronizing or exchanging data between a company’s warehouse and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

In these scenarios, BizTalk serves as a messaging and processing hub between two or more external business systems. A messaging component in BizTalk controls the exchange of messages (typically business documents, such as purchase orders) between systems, and an orchestration component executes the workflow associated with those messages. For example, such workflow could involve converting messages to the data format expected by a target system and determining the conditions under which messages are sent to that system. (The term orchestration is roughly synonymous with the term system workflow as used in WWF.)