Microsoft Biz Talk Server

Microsoft Biz Talk Server

Microsoft BizTalk Server, often referred to as simply "BizTalk", is an Enterprise Service Bus. Through the use of "adapters" which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in an enterprise, it enables companies to automate business processes. Created by Microsoft, it provides the following functions: Enterprise Application Integration, Business Process Automation, Business-To-Business Communication, Message broker, and Business Activity Monitoring. BizTalk Server used to be repositioned as an Application Integration Server but also as an Application Server. Microsoft changed this strategy since they released App fabric server that is their Application Server.

In a common scenario, BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage automated business processes by exchanging business documents such as purchase orders and invoices between disparate applications, within or across organizational boundaries. Human-centric processes cannot be implemented directly with BizTalk Server and need additional applications like Microsoft SharePoint server.

Development for BizTalk Server is done through Microsoft Visual Studio. A developer can create transformation maps transforming one message type to another (for example an XML file can be transformed to SAP IDocs, etc.). Messages inside BizTalk are implemented through the XML documents and defined with the XML schemas in XSD standard. Maps are implemented with the XSLT standard. Orchestrations are implemented with the WS-BPEL compatible process language xLANG. Schemas, maps, pipelines and orchestrations are created visually using graphical tools within Microsoft Visual Studio. The additional functionality can be delivered by .NET assemblies that can be called from existing modules—including, for instance, orchestrations, maps, pipelines, business rules.