Capability | Description |
|---|
Messaging | The messaging subsystem provides communication with a wide range of external applications through adapters. Dozens of adapters are supplied, free of charge with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to handle proprietary protocols and to support the conversion to and from different data formats. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides standards-based service enablement for BizTalk endpoints through WCF adapters and for Line-of-Business (LOB) applications through the WCF LOB adapter SDK. Messages are received and sent by BizTalk inbound and outbound endpoints. These endpoints provide versatile capabilities for parsing and handling messages as they flow in and out of BizTalk such as: message encoding and decoding, schema validation, and message de-batching and assembling. The messaging capabilities include a scalable, durable storage that enables publish / subscribe mechanism as well as robust and fault tolerant message routing. It includes single-sign-on capabilities and message security features such as encryption and decryption, signing, and verifying message signature. |
Orchestration (Service Composition) | Orchestrations allow for service composition in a declarative way (using visual shapes) to implement automation of business process or systems workflow. Orchestration engine provides a rich and robust runtime infrastructure. Orchestration and messaging capabilities simplify and expedite the implementation of typical enterprise integration patterns such as dynamic message routing and aggregation of services. Implementation of service orchestration for long running business processes is made easy though the built-in features such as automatic orchestration persistence and state management and correlation of asynchronous message responses. |
Business to Business Integration (B2Bi) | BizTalk Server 2006 R2 includes comprehensive data exchange options to communicate with Trading Partners through industry standards. These features include integrated support within the BizTalk Server engine for Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) data (including X12, EDIFACT and HIPAA support) and Availability Statement 2 (AS2) data for EDI over the Internet. BizTalk Accelerators speed up the development of standards based B2B solutions within specific industry segment such as: the SWIFT, HL7 and RossetaNet Accelerators. Trading partner information and partner agreements can be stored and managed, allowing for rapid on boarding and provisioning of partners and for streamlining business communication with them. |
RFID Platform | Microsoft BizTalk RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) is an innovative platform, designed to significantly reduce the complexity in development and deployment of RFID-based solutions. It supports the broadest range of RFID hardware devices in the market today, providing the enterprise customer with an unprecedented choice of RFID hardware through device abstraction, management and simulation. Rich event processing capabilities enable filtering, aggregation and transformation of RFID bit steams to meaningful business events. The RFID platform enables businesses to easily create, deploy, manage, and integrate their existing business processes and ERP applications with RFID technology. |
Business Rule Framework | A full-featured Rules Framework, that promotes modularity of business logic, code reuse, and simplicity to minimize the effort of business logic updates. The framework makes it easy to develop highly declarative, semantically rich rules that link to any facts (such as .NET components, XML documents, or database tables). It also provides a forward-chaining Inference Business Rule Engine and an infrastructure to support rule versioning, deployment, and updating. |
Business Activity Monitoring (Aspect-Oriented Tracking) | Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides visibility on business processes by tracking process milestones and business data (KPIs). BAM allows business users and decision makers to gain insight on the current health of in-flight processes they are responsible for. Up-to-date information is accessible to users via Microsoft Office BI tools or a designated portal and through automatic business alerts. This allows users to streamline and improve daily business operations by proactively escalating issues and mitigating problems sooner. BAM is composed of a collection of tools and runtime components to layer business tracking without having to write any code. A set of runtime interceptors capture interesting business events inside of BizTalk Application or other applications and publish those events into the BAM infrastructure. It also provides a set of tools for managing this infrastructure, tools for aggregating and viewing the data as well as APIs to optionally publish data to through custom code. |
Management and Operations | BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides comprehensive capabilities for managing application artifacts and endpoints and for tracking of messages, process, and services. These capabilities streamline the job of administrators that need to deploy enterprise wide BizTalk applications to highly distributed environments. The management capabilities of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 are vital for supporting mission critical application requirements such as: scale out, fault tolerance and load balancing. To ensure the BizTalk system health and performance, a set of utilities and tools allow administrators to easily configure, monitor, and maintain the underlying infrastructure of databases, hosts, and services. |
