Microsoft has invested thousands of development years to create one of the most productive service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) tools on the market: Microsoft BizTalk Server. What used to take customers months and years to design and implement now takes days and weeks. Nowadays, however, most organizations have gone well beyond simple application and trading partner connectivity; instead, they are designing and implementing next-generation composite applications that sit on top of an integrated foundation. Despite that improvement, Microsoft believes that there are still significant resource savings that can be made by further improving the tools and better integrating the developer and information worker environments.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 represents the next release in Microsoft’s long-term strategy to enable the connected enterprise. This release builds on the existing integration capabilities, which make it easier and less expensive to connect systems within an organization as well as those of partners and customers.
Today, more than 7,000 global customers (83 percent of the Global 2000) have bet their business on BizTalk Server - many for mission critical workloads. By lowering the cost and complexity of seamlessly integrating disparate systems, BizTalk Server provides the same class of infrastructure to a broad set of customers.
With the release of BizTalk Server 2006 R2, out of the box connectivity with the enterprise is provided through the broadest industry support of WS* protocols, the edge via Microsoft BizTalk RFID, and support for integrating business partners though EDI.
BizTalk Server 2004
With BizTalk Server 2004, the third generation of Microsoft's business process management server, customers gained the benefits of integration with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft Office System. BizTalk Server 2004 enhanced the existing business process orchestration functionality and introduced new capabilities for business activity monitoring (BAM). BizTalk Server 2004 also enhanced application and technology integration with an extended set of adapters, improved business to business (B2B) capabilities including trading partner management, a highly scalable rules engine, and a rich foundation based on the .NET Framework, for building service-oriented applications via rich Web services support.
BizTalk Server 2006
BizTalk Server 2006 offered significant improvements in key aspects of connecting applications and businesses, business process automation and management, and service oriented architecture. A new management console provided a single view for managing, monitoring, and deploying BizTalk servers. There were also enhancements to application-level management and improvements to the engine and infrastructure on which the applications ran. Business users were empowered with extended BAM capabilities such as real-time alerting and notifications, and enhanced integration with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Additionally, more than 23 technology and application adapters were included with BizTalk Server 2006 (at no additional charge) to help customers integrate existing assets within their service oriented architecture. To learn more about the technology and application adapters included with BizTalk Server 2006, see the Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapters page.
BizTalk Server 2006 was closely aligned with the Windows Server System in supporting 64-bit architecture and the latest versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio, Microsoft Virtual Server, and the .NET Framework 2.0.
BizTalk Server 2006 also ensured a seamless upgrade from BizTalk Server 2004 without the need to rewrite applications.
Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides seven adapters and wizards that enable easy communication to and from BizTalk Server and Web services-based applications via the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 expands BAM functionality with interceptors for both WCF and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This enables easy management of aggregations, alerts, and profiles of non-BizTalk Server applications, including those that constitute a key component of an end-to-end business process. By using these new BAM interceptors, customers are able to define and track key performance indicators throughout their business process.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 includes new extensions to the Windows Communication Foundation that make it easier to write WCF-based transports to expose existing technologies and applications. This provides for a simplified programming model on top of the WCF Channel Framework by adding metadata browsing, searching and retrieval functionality, and development tools for generating and testing adapter code.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 streamlines the complex task of modernization by providing native integration of IBM midrange and mainframe applications. This functionality is designed to help customers connect applications, data sources, messaging, and security systems between IBM mainframe and midrange systems and Microsoft Windows environments.
Microsoft delivers new prescriptive guidance and pre-built reference architectures for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) functionality – using BizTalk Server and WCF to simplify and accelerate the development of service-oriented architectures.
Business Process Management
Additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters, where three new adapters (SAP, Oracle DB, and Siebel) have been rewritten based on the new WCF Adapter SDK. This enables easier connectivity to line of business data from SharePoint Server, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies.
Pre-built integration between BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server has been updated to provide support for the latest Office release, the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Through the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA), Microsoft is providing support for a powerful set of end-to-end tools for automating and optimizing business processes. This includes partner solutions for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 in the areas of business process modeling and analysis, business rules management, human-centric workflow, and process simulation. For more information about the Business Process Alliance, see the Microsoft Business Process Alliance Enables Mainstream Adoption of Business Process Management PressPass page.
Business to Business Integration
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides more data exchange options including a native engine that provides integrated support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) data (including both X12 and EDIFACT support) and Availability Statement 2 (AS2) data for EDI over the Internet. There are also additional enhancements to B2B accelerators for HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT, and RosettaNet.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides a device abstraction layer and management tools for connecting to intelligent Radio Frequency ID (RFID) devices. These include a complex event-processing layer for applying filters, alerts and transforms to RFID events, support for design, runtime, and management APIs, and back-office integration to major LOB applications and technology platforms.
Other Enhancements
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 builds on the Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities by adding a management agent for Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) and an MMC snap-in for easier remote management of SSO servers.
This service from Microsoft provides integrated product updates for Windows and other Microsoft products including BizTalk Server 2006 R2.
Beyond BizTalk Server 2006 R2
The next generation of BizTalk Server will continue to build on the investments made to address service oriented architecture and business process management.
One of the primary themes will be advancing the software development process through continued adoption of model-driven development and composition capabilities. Future versions of BizTalk Server will continue to raise the level of abstraction of creating process-centric composite applications by providing support for models and development tools. This will enable the rapid assembly of "People-Ready Processes" as opposed to writing low-level infrastructure. These advancements will further empower our partner ecosystem to deliver innovative process-centric applications by leveraging BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server as a combined extensible business process platform.
Using a shared set of tools and infrastructure, future versions of BizTalk Server will provide the necessary building blocks to achieve an end-to-end development lifecycle of process-centric composite applications. This will help foster collaboration between various roles involved in the development process – spanning the business analyst, developer, architect, and IT professional - and it will help further reduce TCO.
Finally, a key area of continued development will be around providing a unified and comprehensive platform for building composite applications by deep alignment with the .NET Framework (Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation). This will enable customers to mix both service oriented architectures and hosted Internet services (software as a service) via a single platform. Continuing to deliver rich interoperability via ubiquitous connectivity with all platforms - using Web services and adapters, will encourage broad process reach, and exposing, composing, and consuming services of all types (for example, WS-*, REST, POX).
Future versions of BizTalk Server will provide customers with valuable, comprehensive solutions for these critical areas of business integration:
Service Oriented Architecture
Building deeply on the investments made with Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation by closer alignment of these technologies and BizTalk Server to enable customers to build richer composite applications and service oriented architectures than they can today.
BizTalk Services, which represent hosted versions of a core set of platform services. While currently in incubation, BizTalk Services is an Internet Service Bus (ISB) that combines identity and access control, message routing (relay), and publish/subscribe event brokering (eventing). For more information, see the BizTalk Labs home page.
Composite Applications
Building on the work with XLANG (BizTalk Server) and XAML (WF) by providing a richer set of domain-specific models.
Building on the host investments made with WF and BizTalk Server, to enhance the deployment and management experience of composite applications.
Business Process Management
Integration with SharePoint Server to provide expanded support for human task-based scenarios.
Enhancements to existing visual modeling and design experiences that span roles and help foster team collaboration.
Enhancements to BAM to provide broader monitoring support.
As the business process integration needs of organizations continue to evolve, Microsoft remains committed to ensuring their success by providing comprehensive management and operations tools, improved business user empowerment capabilities, enhanced developer productivity, deeper integration with Windows Server System software, and key advancements in performance, deployment, and migration. BizTalk Server has the largest customer base of any business process and integration server on the market, and Microsoft remains committed to delivering innovation and value through future releases to help developers, IT professionals, and business users achieve integration in their company.
