BizTalk Server 2009 represents the next release in Microsoft’s long-term strategy to enable the connected enterprise. Microsoft has created one of the most productive infrastructures for enterprise connectivity and integration on the market: Microsoft BizTalk Server. What used to take customers months and years to design and implement now takes days and weeks. But customers are building increasingly complex composite applications, and Microsoft believes that we can go much farther to help them by further improving the tools and better integrating the developer and information worker environments. BizTalk Server 2009 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. Used in conjunction with other components of our “Real World SOA” application platform (e.g., Windows Server, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and SharePoint) BizTalk Server allows service-oriented applications to connect and interoperate to a wide range of highly heterogeneous systems, including LOB systems, legacy systems, smart devices, and trading partners.
Today, more than 8,500 global customers 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.
BizTalk Server 2009 introduces enhancements and new featured in four main areas:
Support for the latest platforms from Microsoft including server, database and development environment
Enhanced developer productivity and new application life cycle management experience for development teams
New capabilities for implementing agile SOA integration solutions across heterogeneous technologies and Line of Business systems
Enhanced B2B and RFID capabilities to allow the implementation of flexible end-to-end supply chain management and asset tracking solutions
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 offered 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 supported 64-bit architecture and the latest versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio, Microsoft Virtual Server, and the .NET Framework.
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).
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
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.
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.
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 helps 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.
Through the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA), Microsoft provides 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, see the Microsoft Business Process Alliance 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 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.
BizTalk Server 2009
The next version of BizTalk Server continues to build on the investments made to address the concerns of service oriented architecture and enterprise connectivity.
Updated Platform Support
BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools.
BizTalk Server 2009 now takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
By taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 clustering, BizTalk Server is now able to be deployed in multi-site cluster scenarios, where cluster nodes could reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs.
Developer and Team Productivity
BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), and allows development teams to be able to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.
BizTalk Server 2009 introduces a number of improvements have been made to the underlying Visual Studio based BizTalk project system which enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps (XSLT), pipeline components and XLANG Orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.
Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
ESB Toolkit 2.0 delivers updated prescriptive guidance, tools and frameworks for applying ESB usage patterns. The enhancements and new features in ESB Toolkit 2.0 include the following: improved itinerary processing and itinerary modeling using a visual Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools approach, a pluggable resolver-adapter pack, and an enhanced ESB management portal.
BizTalk Server 2009 includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API.
BizTalk Server 2009 provides two new adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, plus additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters.
BizTalk Server 2009 adds a new WCF WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers. Additionally, BizTalk Server 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ.
By expanding the out of the box BAM functionality with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations which enhances support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007.
Business to Business Integration
BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for multiple message attachments, configurable auto message resend, end-to-end filename preservation, improved reporting to address new features, and Drummond re-certification for AS2.
By building on a rich SWIFT foundation, BizTalk Server 2009 updates all message schemas and business rules for compliance with SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification, as a result adds support for SWIFT FIN Flat File message types and business rules, BIC Plus IBAN interface, and Extensibility to support SEPA Routing.
Device Connectivity
BizTalk Server 2009 delivers a new lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile includes support for enhanced device management, Powershell support for administration of edge infrastructures and the ability to monitor RFID infrastructure using System Center Operations Manager 2007.
Support for key industry standards (including LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support).
Other Enhancements
BizTalk Server 2009 improves recoverable interchange processing of validation failures by providing support for recoverable interchange processing for disassembly (DASM) and a validation stage within the pipeline. The WCF Adapter has been enhanced to provide support for configurable transactions and the ability to choose the transaction isolation level in the WCF-Custom Send Adapter.
By continuing to build on the improvements to the BizTalk Management Console made in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, two new query types have been added for tracked message events and tracked service events which consolidates all queries – tracked/archived data, live data and specialized EDI reports, into a single tool.
Developer productivity enhancements (e.g. complex mapping);
Enhanced B2B support (e.g. complex trading partner management, expanded industry standards and schemas);
Low-latency messaging enhancements and ESB improvements;
Enhanced support for cross-enterprise asset tracking, enterprise manageability of devices, and key industry standards;
Real-time business event visibility through BI / BAM Enhancements; and
Integration with the latest new platform capabilities (to take advantage of the latest advances in the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Windows Server).
BizTalk Server and "Oslo" and .NET
"Oslo" is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modeling platform. Modeling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. "Oslo" delivers a new integrated platform for connecting across modeling domains, including a new "Oslo" modeling tool, an "Oslo" modeling language, and an "Oslo" repository. As we gathered feedback from BizTalk customers, they indicated they would prefer to take a disciplined, evolutionary path to adopting some of these newer platform technologies. We have thousands of customers that have deployed mission-critical applications on top of our BizTalk Server architecture; they want to decide for themselves when to move to newer versions of the platform.
Therefore, it’s an important guiding principle to our planning efforts that we preserve our customers existing investments in their BizTalk Server infrastructure. In fact, you won’t need to upgrade BizTalk Server to take advantage of "Oslo" – current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 or BizTalk Server 2009 customers can benefit from "Oslo" by being able to leverage and compose existing services into new composite applications. BizTalk Server today provides the ability to service enable LOB systems or trading partners as web services (using WCF supported protocols), which can be composed with the "Oslo" modeling technologies.
This principle applies to advances in the .NET Framework as well, such as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In response to customer feedback, we are committed to continued support for BizTalk Server’s XLANG orchestration technology - the existing BizTalk orchestration engine. Additional support for WF will be prioritized for the coming releases based upon customer demand and scenarios.
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As the needs of organizations continue to evolve, Microsoft remains committed to ensuring their success by providing driving mainstream enterprise connectivity across our application platform through BizTalk Server. Instead of investing in plumbing to connect across platforms and application, BizTalk lets our customers shift the investment to more value-added development of applications and processes. At the heart, this is Microsoft doing what Microsoft does best – make hard things simple through productive tools and runtimes. BizTalk Server has the largest customer base of any 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 enterprise integration in their company.
