Microsoft BizTalk Server

Microsoft BizTalk Server is the server for business performance management (BPM server) designed to automate and optimize the company business processes. It includes powerful and already known tools to project, develop, deploy and manage business processes:

• ntegrated management tools;
• web-services support;
• new portal to monitor business activities (BAM-portal);
• 23 adapters for applications andi technologies that ensure connections with the legacy systems (mainframes and the mid-range systems) and with special applications;
• 23 адаптера для приложений и технологий, с помощью которых можно подключаться к (SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle and JD Edwards).

More than 7 000 organizations all over the world has entrusted Microsoft BizTalk Server to integrate their systems and to automate their processes.

Functionality

Microsoft BizTalk Server offers end-to-end real-time management of business processes uniting applications and servers both inside and outside the organization. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 helps the users to retrieve operational business data by collecting these data from a variety of separated, sometimes geographically distributed and poorly integrated applications and systems. Thus it enables the users to see in time each important business event. All this is supported by a reliable infrastructure of a corporate level, which guaranties undisturbed operations.

Microsoft BizTalk Server helps organizations to manage effectively their delivery process starting from product manufacturing and up to its final delivery to the shop. The delivery chain end-to-end management ensures control over all important process steps and provides smooth relationships with vendors. The system allows for data collection from the very first step, thus guarantying a complete transparence of both the internal business process and vendor communications.

Microsoft BizTalk Server provides infrastructure for uniting the existing applications (independently on their platform); it allows organization of service-based system interactions, including their composition, representation and consumption. This ensures a substantial return of the existing systems (and your investments) and the minimum cost to integrate new applications into the existing infrastructure. Microsoft BizTalk Server plays the major part in any SOA-strategy due to its integration with .NET environment and its connection tools that can be applied both with standard systems and self-developed software.

Besides, Microsoft BizTalk Server can be used with a large variety of adapters both technological and for application platforms. Microsoft BizTalk Server package includes the full range of tools to connect with everything: from transport protocols, e.g. FTP SOAP and MQSeries to a high-level integration with business applications, such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel. You can choose by yourself the way to integrate you applications, platforms and users – we provide you with every possible tool.

Microsoft BizTalk Server is the world most widely used server for business process management. Organizations of any scale and from all industries trust this server with their most important business applications. Microsoft BizTalk Server Enterprise Edition includes the built-in support for load sharing, which guarantees the continuous work of the most important applications in 24/7 mode. Microsoft BizTalk Server was initially designed with regard to fault-tolerance requirements; it includes an adjustable and controllable SQL Server® clustering mechanism, which guarantees the absence of a single system breakdown point.

While keeping the basic architecture of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and possessing the best in their class setup and configuration tools Microsoft BizTalk Server offers its users a smooth and painless way to migrate their Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 or Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 solutions to the new version.

Components

Microsoft BizTalk Server includes the following basic components:

• Message management. Microsoft BizTalk Server helps to organize the efficient processing of incoming and outgoing messages. This also includes the ability to connect to various internal and external systems, work with different formats and adapters, as well as the message based support of data security.
• Orchestration allows the setup of centrally managed message processing business processes in transaction and non-transaction modes. Orchestration helps to streamline and automate complex business processes: at the designing stage it helps to visually describe their logic; during the commercial operation stage orchestration performs these processes in Microsoft BizTalk Server Orchestration Engine environment.
• Business rules machine allows defining the business rules policies that influence the logic of a business process. The policy logic abstracts the business process logic from orchestration. Thus, it is possible to modify the business process without modifying the existing orchestration.
• Business-2-Business integration. Electronic transactions with business partners can play a vitally important role in the general aggregation of your company’s business processes. Microsoft BizTalk Server provides the internet B2B integration with the systems of your partners by using industrial standards and protocols, such as: EDI (including support of X12, EDIFACT and HIPAA) and AS2 for EDI. The existing accelerators of Microsoft BizTalk Server can speed up the development of B2B solutions for separate application tasks, using the SWIFT, HL7, RosettaNet standards.
• RFID platform — Microsoft BizTalk Server RFID is the infrastructure for terminal device management; it is also the platform for event processing, thus providing development, deployment and solution management possibilities based on RFID technology.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) allows the real-time monitoring and collection of statistical data from the currently active business processes. BAM offers its business users the possibility to see the full picture of each business process, from start to finish.
• Management tools. Microsoft BizTalk Server includes advanced tools to manage the execution environment, including application management, support of application deployment processes, host-systems management, step-by-step process execution tracking and report generation.
• Tools. Microsoft BizTalk Server contains a set of tools for configuring, designing, deploying, managing and visualizing of Microsoft BizTalk Server processes and its own functional components. These tools are provided in different ways: some of them are integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, some are delivered in addition to Microsoft Management Console (MMC), the rest are shipped as web tools.

Available edition

Enterprise Edition. This edition is ideal for large enterprises that require a developed SOA- and BPM-platform with almost unlimited scalability, capable to process enormous data volumes, to ensure the continuous performance, to use the unlimited number of processors. This edition includes cluster support and allows integration with an unlimited number of user applications and external trading partners.

Standard Edition. This addition is a fully-functional platform for SOA- and BPM solutions for mid-size organizations or separate departments. It is limited by five internal applications; it does not include cluster support; it is possible to use up to five processors on one server.

Branch Edition. This edition realizes the “center-branch” scenario and is meant to use in complex with Enterprise Edition. Branch Edition can be also used by companies to connect their internal systems and integrations on the department level.

Developer Edition. This edition is designed only for development and testing.