Biztalk Server 2002 with EAI

Please note: Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity

Hosts:

Moderator: Ben (Microsoft)
Welcome to the Microsoft Online Chat Biztalk Server 2002 with EAI. Let's introduce our hosts for today...

Moderator: Ben (Microsoft)
My name is Ben Miller and I am a Program Manager in Communities

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
I am Anand and I am a program manager in BizTalk Server group

Host: Balinder (Microsoft)
hi, I am Balinder Malhi. I am a software engineer in BizTalk product team.

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Hi, I’m Mike Woods. I’m a technical Product Manager for the BizTalk Server Team.

Host: Darren (Microsoft)
I'm Darren Thurman and I was testing integration and performance for BizTalk 2002

Host: David (Microsoft)
My name is David Fong and I'm a Program Manager with the BizTalk Server Team, focused on Orchestration.

Host: Lee (Microsoft)
HI. I'm Lee and I am a software engineer on the BizTalk Server Messaging engine

Host: Mahendra (Microsoft)
I am Mahendra. I am a Tester (SDET) of BizTalk Messaging Engine

Moderator: Ben (Microsoft)
Let's begin the chat...

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: Do you have ant information on the upcoming Jupiter product series? Will BizTalk be a complete .NET product?

A: Unfortunately this isn’t the forum to answer questions about future products.

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
Q: Can you briefly describe BizTalk ?

A: BizTalk Server 2002 is a server product used to integrate different applications and business partners and to define their business processes.

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: I am interested to know how BizTalk will integrate with legacy mainframe apps

A: Basically we are the middleware between applications. We use adapters and accelerators to communicate with other systems. There are a list of the library of adapters on the web site (www.microsoft.com/biztalk <http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/>). There are over 350 of them currently.

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
Q: Briefly - the diff. between an accelerator and adapter?

A: Accelerators are a set of components that relate to a common technology. Adapters are components that connect to a specific transport or Line of Business Application. For more details refer to http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: Can i use BizTalk to share data between various level of dataflow, Like Data from control process data ERP system ?

A: Yes, that is what we’re all about.

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: Could you make a call from SAP to a web service which communicates with BizTalk? It's probably more of a SAP question and not related to BizTalk

A: I’m not sure that SAP can natively call an Web Service. We can certainly expose functionality as a web service.

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
Q: Isn't HIS part of the mainframe strategy to work with BizTalk? I've heard that it may have been dropped, but am not sure if this is true.

A: HIS is very much a part of the server strategy of Microsoft to integrate with Mainframe systems. It is not being dropped.

Host: Mahendra (Microsoft)
Q: Can BTS handle xml namespace within the doc definition?

A: Yes. From schema editor you can do that. We support only one xml namespace within the doc definition.

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: OK, then BizTalk and OPC (OLE for process Control) can work closely, isn't it ?

A: I’m not sure what OPC is, but we can call out to a COM interface pretty easily. Does that answer the question?

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: Will there be a mainframe ADO.NET provider for upcoming version of HIS to work with BizTalk?

A: None of us here are sure what the features of the next version of HIS are. I’d suggest that you post the question to the public HIS newsgroup.

Host: Lee (Microsoft)
Q: We acquire hospital data and produce executive level reports for healthcare administrators?

A: This is still very vague. If you need to be able to handle the HIPAA format, we have a HIPAA accelarator. If you need to talk to HIS, sure you can call it via a custom adapter. If you need to generate a report, you could write a schedule which gathers data from various sources, builds a report and drops it somewhere as a response to a request (ie a user sends a request to messaging which then kicks off an orchestration, generates the report and sends it back via messaging) That come close to answering your question?

Host: Mahendra (Microsoft)
Q: Is the BizTalk Server 2002 Tookit for Microsoft .Net an "officially supported" product or it still best try?

A: Yes it is officially supported

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: Will you provide more document definitions (e.g. SAP iDOCs) in upcoming versions of the product?

A: We have IDOC capability in our BizTalk Adapter for SAP today. That strategy is likely to be the same in the future.

Host: Lee (Microsoft)
Q: Scott: Almost...we need to obtain data from various sources within the hospital, format the data and have it delivered to our operations facility electronically?

A: There are choices here. Can you do this ... yes. You could try and build this into some custom preprocessor in a pipeline, or you could write the schedule like I said, and if you need to do some complex formatting logic on the retreived data, you could call a loopback channel to get the data in your correct format (potentially using the HIPAA Accelarator) if necessary. Then use the schedule to format the data into a report and send out via a messaging pipeline to do final formatting and sending good?

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Q: I looked it up, and you're right: BPEL4WS. Will this language be a part of BizTalk in the future?

A: Yes we are supporting BPEL4WS in the next version.

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
Q: What is the upside of MS's vision of bundling BTS with other server products in the future?

A: Please refer to the URL announcing the integrated solution: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/oct02/10-08jupiterpr.mspx

Host: Mahendra (Microsoft)
Q: Mark : Is it wise to put our development BTS server on Windows 2003 RC2?

A: This is officially not supported yet. Wait for upcoming Bizet SP1 release which is about 90 days after Windows 2003

Moderator: Ben (Microsoft)
This chat is about out of time. We will try to answer the last questions and we appreciate your participation.

Moderator: Ben (Microsoft)
Thanks to the Hosts and for the participants questions, we will see you again soon.

Host: Lee (Microsoft)
Thanks for stoppin by

Host: Anand (Microsoft)
Thanks for joining us in the chat.

Host: Darren (Microsoft)
Thanks for your questions.

Host: Mike (Microsoft)
Thanks for giving us your time. We appreciate it!

For further information on this topic, please visit the following:

Newsgroups: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/newsgroups/server/biztalk.mspx

Transcripts: Read the archive of past BizTalk chats.

Website: Visit the home page for BizTalk Server

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