Microsoft BizTalk Server
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Microsoft BizTalk Server is a server product by Microsoft which provides the following functions: Business Process Automation, Business Process Modeling, Business-to-business Communication, Enterprise Application Integration and Message broker[1].
It's a server product targeted mostly at medium to large enterprises, but has been popular among small companies as well. In a common scenario, BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging business documents (e.g., purchase orders and invoices) among applications, within or across organizational boundaries.
Development for BizTalk Server is done through Visual Studio .NET.
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[edit] Versions for Windows
- 2000 - BizTalk Server 2000
- 2002 - BizTalk Server 2002
- 2004 - BizTalk Server 2004 (First version to run on Microsoft .NET 1.0)
- 2006 - BizTalk Server 2006 (First version to run on Microsoft .NET 2.0)
- 2007 - BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (First version to utilise the new Windows Communication Foundation)
[edit] Features
The following is an incomplete list of some of the technical features in the BizTalk Server:
- A range of adapters for allowing easy integration to Line of Business Applications (eg. Siebel, SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle), Databases (Oracle, DB2) and other Technologies (Tibco, J2EE, etc)
- An engine for modelling Business Rules in a pseudo-English format. This is a forward chaining rule engine.
- Business Activity Monitoring, which allows a dashboard, graphical view on how the modelled Business Processes are doing
- A unified Administration Dashboard for monitoring deployments of solutions, etc on BizTalk servers in your environment.
- Accelerators which offer support for standards like RosettaNet, EDI, SWIFT, etc.
- Ability to do graphical modelling of business processes in visual studio, graphically mapping between different message formats, and building pipelines to decrypt, verify, parse messages as they enter the system via adapters.
- Microsoft sells the easy integration with their existing products as one of the strong features of BizTalk. BizTalk integrates with products like Office, Infopath and Sharepoint for interacting with humans during a Workflow.
- Extensive support for Webservices (consuming and exposing)
- RFID support in the newest version (BizTalk 2006 R2)
