Benefits for Stakeholders
To date, the education sector has concentrated on building individual systems to meet specific academic or administrative needs. This approach results in ‘information silos’ of disparate, unconnected systems, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of data held on individual students, and the organisation as a whole. The challenge is to bridge the gaps between these silos, by integrating applications to manage the extraction and transformation of core information.
Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 gives the education sector the power to unite core processes within and between institutions. Industry standards including XML, EDI, HTTP, public key encryption, and digital signatures ensure the highest levels of interoperability and security can be delivered. This helps reduce costs, and improve efficiencies.
Five Reasons to Deploy BizTalk Server
| • | Acts as a cost-effective bridge between old and new technology, protecting previous investments. |
| • | Ease of use due to a single, integrated development environment. |
| • | Enterprise-class scalability. |
| • | Flexibility ensures the technology can cope as your institution’s needs grow and change. |
| • | Microsoft is committed to R&D in enterprise integration solutions. This ensures long-term value for customers, and makes BizTalk Server 2004 a low-risk investment for institutions. |
Benefits for Stakeholders
Institutions
The education sector increasingly faces similar challenges to the commercial world. The pace of change is increasing, and it must continuously react to varying conditions. This is a serious problem for many institutions, who have invested a great deal of time and effort in their legacy systems. Although most institutions have individual systems that perform perfectly well in isolation, this is not enough. Academia is now striving, much like many governments across EMEA, for a more joined-up approach to institutional systems. BizTalk Server 2004 assists institutions to maximise existing technology investments, and embrace the future, by bridging the gap between the old and the new.
Students
Most students won’t even know BizTalk Server 2004 has been implemented within an institution. And that is exactly the intention. Students should not be aware of what goes on behind the scenes. They should be able to gain from the benefits that come from an improved flow of information, and single view of data, within an organisation.
Teachers
Through BizTalk Server 2004, teachers and administrative staff are given access to valuable information in real time through Microsoft Office applications. This means they spend less time gathering information, and more time acting on it.
Useful links
System requirements
More information and FAQs
Microsoft BizTalk Server home page
