Introduction to BizTalk Server

Introduction to BizTalk Server

      Microsoft BizTalk Server provides a development and execution environment that orchestrates business processes, both within and between businesses. This can handle business transactions that run as long as weeks or months. The features include the ability to define business document specifications and how these documents have to be transformed when passed between applications, and the ability to monitor and log server activity. The server provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents across the Internet, as well as providing a range of services that ensures data integrity, delivery, and security.

The reasons why BizTalk Server is chosen by business are:

• The solution you build is based on commonly accepted protocols and document formats
• Ability to integrate with the widest variety of business partners and applications.
• Today's global marketplace dictates a need to efficiently operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Ability to integrate with the widest variety of business partners and applications.
• There is also a need to support multiple applications on a variety of platforms, and to integrate with business partners using the Internet, extranets, business-to-business (B2B) exchanges, and other resources

Note: BizTalk Server uses XML internally to define the data and structure of your business documents, and it uses standard Internet protocols like Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver these documents to their destinations, enabling you to interoperate with various applications running in any environment as long as those applications support Internet standards. You can send documents to BizTalk Server as Extensible Markup Language (XML), EDI, or flat files

History of BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server belongs to the Microsoft Server family.

• 2000- Microsoft released the first version of BizTalk Server
• Editor: Writing XML Data
• Mapper: Translate data from source format to destination format
• Management Desk: Tracking data
• Protocols supported: EDI, HTTP, HTTPS, MSMQ, SMTP, and FTP
• 2002 – Next version. Not much change
• 2004 – Added Human Workflow Services (HWS) and Business Activity Services
• Supported by .NET framework 1.0
• Integrated VS 2003 support for editor and mapper
• 2006 – Business Activity Monitor (BAM) was added. Also Health and Activity Tracking component for tracking the server status was added.
• .NET framework 2.0 support
• Integrated VS 2005 support
• 2007 – Also called as 2006 R2 (Release 2)
• Rich UI administration was incorporated.
• .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF, WF) support
• 2009 – Added FID support and separate FRID server
• 2010 – Recent version.
• Enhanced B2B and RFID capabilities
• New intuitive & intelligent Data Map and Transformation tools.
• An enhancement to the Secure FTP with new FTPS Adapter and an improved FTP adapter.
• Enhancements to the IBM Hosts System Adapters
• Adapter support for the latest application version: SAP7, Oracle eBS 12.1, J.D. Edwards 9.0, SQL Server 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010

Next: Installing and Configuring BizTalk Server