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What do Fortune 100 companies like Ford, Verizon, Merrill Lynch, JCPenney, and Sara Lee have in common with organizations such as the U.K. Government and the U.S. Department of Defense? They are all BizTalk Server 2000 customers.
Why are the largest crossnational organizations turning to BizTalk Server to automate and integrate enterprise business processes? In the past, application developers had to write additional code to automate business applications. When business processes changed, developers were required to rewrite their applications. Large corporations quickly found their developers swamped with the maintenance of thousands of lines of additional code.
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| BizTalk helped us reduce one of our applications from 5,000 lines of code to 100. You just can't put a price tag on that kind of efficiency. |
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John Wall
CTO,
HealthAxis.com
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By placing BizTalk Server in the automation role companies can remove the code for describing business processes from their applications. BizTalk Server centrally automates business processes by integrating external business partners, third-party applications, and COM components with easy-to-maintain graphic schedules.
BizTalk Server allows application developers to visually draw business processes with the BizTalk Orchestration Designer tool. The flow of the business process (with if-then decisions, loops, and branching) can now be managed with BizTalk Server instead of their application. BizTalk Server monitors file shares and message queues (MSMQ) and runs a business process when it receives a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) document; for business-to-business (B2B) processes, an ASP page can submit an XML document to BizTalk Server with an included COM interface. To learn more about BizTalk Server, download the 120-day trial software and the Learning BizTalk Server 2000 page.
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BizTalk Server: Bigger Than Big
Making business processes easier to develop is only half the story. BizTalk Server also provides a distributed framework for processing hundreds of millions of transactions a day.
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| I liked the fact that BizTalk had a built-in asynchronous queuing mechanism that would ensure reliable document delivery. It is very robust and very scalable. |
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Chris Keyser
VP Software Development,
VerticalNet
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Smaller companies may use BizTalk Server for point-to-point connectivity, but for larger corporations, this becomes less efficient. In the largest corporations, multiple BizTalk Server groups (shown above) can be joined together using a distributed integration bus. These large organizations are typically organized into autonomous, discrete business units that develop their own systems. There is a need for these business units to both share data with applications controlled by other business units and to communicate with external trading partners.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies have adopted a paradigm for integrating applications that creates one-to-many and many-to-one messaging relationships. In these models, applications do not need to be aware of each other. Data can pass into BizTalk Server and be routed to the appropriate applications. This paradigm focuses on integrating applications with the data distribution infrastructure of the business domain instead of integrating applications directly with each other.
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In this model, applications can be easily plugged into the business network data bus and the applications can participate in the business process flow without creating tightly coupled dependencies between systems.
The BizTalk Server distributed integration bus is made up of distribution lists that enable a one-to-many or many-to-one data distribution model. The illustration above shows one-to-many application integration using the BizTalk Server distributed integration bus.
Getting Started with BizTalk Server
You can download or order the BizTalk Server 2000 120-day trial software. This trial software will be automatically disabled after four months.
The E-Commerce Evaluation Kit is available from the Microsoft Developer's Toolkit site and contains 120-day trial versions of Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server, BizTalk Server, Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft SQL Server™, and Microsoft Visio® 2000.
After you complete the installation of BizTalk Server, visit the MSDN® site to review Learning BizTalk Server 2000. This page contains a set of seven lessons in .doc format that will guide you through the process of building a BizTalk Server business-to-business (B2B) solution.
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