BizTalk 2006 deftly connects enterprise apps

Suppose you’re the new CIO at an enterprise-scale company that has “islands of automation” for accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, sales, support, and HR, and your goal is to integrate all business processes.

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld TEST CENTER DAILY BLOG Track the latest product reviews and news from the InfoWorld Test Center. Microsoft BizTalk 2006 Microsoft, microsoft.com Excellent  8.9 criteria score weight Interoperability 9 30% Features 9 20% Management 9 15% Scalability 9 15% Setup 8 10% Value 9 10% Cost: Enterprise Edition: $29,999 (Unlimited); Standard Edition: $8,499 (one server, two CPUs, five apps); Developer Edition: $499 per user (no deployment; free with MSDN Universal) Platforms: Windows Server 2003; Windows XP and Windows 2000 with reduced functionality. Requires .Net Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2000/2005; requires Visual Studio 2005 for development Bottom Line: Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 offers strong capabilities to all four key constituencies involved in EAI and b-to-b e-commerce: developers, business analysts, IT professionals, and business users. Although it runs only on Windows servers and requires two other Microsoft products, it can connect to and integrate with a wide variety of databases, Web services, and line-of-business applications. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Make the nightmare more realistic: Your 35 major suppliers use a variety of ordering and billing systems, hosted on every operating system and database that has been in use for the past 10 years. They don’t even all use the same data exchange standards. Cap that all off with a mini-rebellion by your independent customer representatives, who have started to use Salesforce.com for customer relations.

[Screencast: biztalk]

What to do?

If you have your IT department build custom point-to-point connectors for every current pair of internal and external systems that needs to be integrated, it might be finished sometime in the next decade -- and by then most of the end points will have changed. What you need is some kind of hub-and-spoke or bus architecture to make the tangled problem manageable.

Welcome to the wonderful worlds of EAI and b-to-b e-commerce, two areas for which Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 was designed.

BizTalk acts as a hub to connect many different systems through a central XML-based messaging and orchestration engine. Through the use of adapters, messages can be connected to the various systems, represented as different shapes below the Messaging box. BizTalk 2006 ships with about 23 (see “Highly Adaptable” infographic). Additional adapters -- for Salesforce.com, for example -- can be purchased from Microsoft ISVs.

BizTalk has functionality for many different roles. Developers build BizTalk applications in Visual Studio 2005, consisting of a number of artifacts, including XML schemas, mappings, orchestrations, pipelines, and business rules. IT professionals deploy, configure, and monitor BizTalk applications using the BizTalk Server Administration Console, and possibly Microsoft Operations Manager. Business users can view business activity through a customizable Web dashboard or through an Excel add-in.

The bundling of BizTalk artifacts into deployable applications is one of the major improvements in BizTalk 2006 over BizTalk 2004. Others include significantly easier installations and upgrades, a management console for IT, the aforementioned business dashboard, and integration with SharePoint. BizTalk 2006 ships with a much enlarged suite of adapters, including adapters for many line-of-business applications. It also takes full advantage of 64-bit processors, and it leverages the improved performance of SQL Server 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 over their predecessors.

Get down to bizness

Developers who struggled with installation of BizTalk 2004 will appreciate how far it’s come. In one afternoon, I was able to install BizTalk 2006 from a DVD onto my 3.2GHz Pentium 4 computer with 1GB of RAM, already running Windows XP SP2, Visual Studio 2005, Internet Information Server (IIS), and SQL Server 2005. During most of that time, the BizTalk installer ran automatically, while I worked on a different computer.

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BizTalk’s graphical tools for developers make quick work of many of the routine tasks for connecting systems. The Mapper, for example, allows you to draw lines to connect related variables in the source and destination message schemas, and the Orchestration Designer allows you to drag shapes from the Orchestrations toolbox onto a design surface and then configure the properties of each shape. There are times you do have to write code, but it is often a simple relational expression.

Many of the configuration decisions will be transparent to developers. You do need to know whether an end point is a database, flat file, Web service, or line-of-business application, but not the exact URL or location of the production end point; that can be configured at deployment time by an IT professional using the 2006 Administration Console and then modified when external conditions change.

Developers also don’t need to know whether a BizTalk application will run on a single computer along with its SQL Server message store or be deployed to a separate cluster. An IT professional can independently design and modify the deployment details later based on the application monitoring information.