BizTalk Server 2000 Frequently Asked Questions

We recommend that you begin with the BizTalk Server 2000 Readme file that is included with the BizTalk Server 2000 beta download. It is full of late-breaking advisories and other helpful information. It will help you quickly determine if you are experiencing a bug or a feature that did not get implemented in an intended fashion. Your next reading assignment is to read the BizTalk Server 2000 Installation Guide http://atgwebsource/biztalk/productinfo/sysreq.htm. The installation guide contains all the system requirements needed to install BizTalk Server 2000 successfully.

There is probably no better way to get started than to work through the Tutorial modules included with the product. These modules will enable you to gain experience quickly in navigating the features of the product and understanding the vocabulary. Through this practical exposure, you will learn the most important facets of the product in several hours. These tutorials can be found in the product documentation. Click the Start button in the Microsoft Windows® operating system, point to Programs, and click Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. The tutorials can be found by selecting the BizTalk Server Documentation; look under the BizTalk Server 2000 Tutorial.

You will learn how to create flexible, loosely coupled integration solutions based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and other structured document formats. These types of solutions are becoming increasingly common in modern business-to-business marketplaces and trading-partner solutions.

You should understand the concept of "well-formed" and "valid" XML. Knowing the key reasons for adopting XML schemas as the preferred way of defining data-driven XML messages (versus document type definitions) and how XML schemas are evolving would be incredibly helpful. All of this knowledge will also speed your understanding of the BizTalk Framework and how it is being used to enable efficient business-to-business transactions over the Internet. An extremely useful place to start learning about XML is the XML Developer Center in the developer program on the MSDN® site, which provides information on XML as well as access to online tutorials.

Web distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV) is an emerging Internet standard from the WebDAV Working Group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In anticipation of your need to leverage this functionality in the near future, BizTalk uses WebDAV to store and retrieve schemas and mapping files. See WebDav: Evolving the Web into a Read and Write Medium on the MSDN site to better understand why the designers of BizTalk felt this is the best time to include this important feature in the BizTalk architecture.

We advise you to completely uninstall the product before reinstalling it, at this stage of the product's development. In addition, it is easiest if you delete all the "InterchangeXX" databases that BizTalk Setup created. In this way, you can start from scratch and be assured of the cleanest setup with little frustration. However, this will no longer be necessary with subsequent releases.

All BizTalk Server agreements, data-tracking information, and transactional information use Microsoft SQL Server™ as a store. Components of BizTalk Server can be likened to an elaborate state engine. SQL Server is the mechanism used to store this state. In addition, the databases provide common storage for agreements, pipeline information, and transactional integrity. Every message that passes through BizTalk Server is meticulously "checkpointed" in the associated SQL Server database to provide recoverability should a failure occur at any point in the process.

Installing BizTalk Server and SQL Server on the same computer is perfectly acceptable. In an enterprise environment, it is more likely that one or more servers running BizTalk Server will connect to a common SQL Server–based computer to take advantage of your supporting resources and procedures. BizTalk Server supports either deployment option.

If an error or failure occurs in BizTalk Server, there are three places that you can look for more details.

Note: For the BizTalk Server Technology Preview release only, it is required that certain Microsoft Office components be installed on the machine from which you are browsing for the Document Tracking Query Tool to function. If you do not have the Office suite installed, you will not be able to use this feature. To enhance the logging information collected and presented (with more details and more events), you can open the pipeline and click the Storage and Logging icon. Once there, you will be able to designate the degree and granularity of logging actions.

When the server attempts to deliver a message to an HTTP location specified in your outbound agreement, the server may place the item in the Suspended Queue and enter an error in the Application Event Log as follows:

An error occurred in BizTalk Server.
Details:
------------------------------
The HTTPS request returned an error code other than 200 (HTTP(S)_OK).
The server may not be responding.
A transmission attempt failed.

This error means that the BizTalk Server component (BizTalk.SendHTTPX) returned a response of something other than "HTTP 200 OK". To see what the exact error is, look in the Web server logs created by your Web server. This is a known issue that is addressed in the the beta release of BizTalk Server 2000.)

One of the most efficient ways to accomplish this goal is to use the BizTalk Server 2000 Tutorial for the Microsoft Visual Basic® development system. (A tutorial for the Microsoft Visual C++® development system will be available in the beta release.) In tutorial's series of four modules, you can expect to learn how to accomplish Direct, Custom, and Generic programming objectives using the exposed interfaces available in this technology preview.

BizTalk Server 2000 and client utilities will work only on the Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server operating system, despite documentation to the contrary. The exception is the BizTalk Server Document Tracking Query Tool that will run on Windows NT.

Use "net start btssvc" to start BizTalk Server Service and "net stop btssvc" to stop it.

BizTalk Server is capable of processing messages with attachments. Upon input to BizTalk Server Technology Preview, the message and all attachments must be a multipart Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)–encoded binary large object (BLOB). On output from BizTalk Server, the message and all its attachments will be delivered as a multipart MIME-encoded BLOB as well.

At the present time and with Commerce Server version 3.0, there is no standard way of doing so. There is no document specification (schema) for the Commerce OrderForm object because the XML it produces is not well formed. To accomplish this, it will be necessary to code a custom solution that produces well-formed XML, which in turn will provide a schema against which to validate. It is expected that the release of Commerce Server 2000 will simplify this facility greatly.

A "localhost" alias requires name-resolution services in some cases. Where WebDAV is concerned, this can lead to some inconsistent behaviors. We recommend you replace "localhost" with the actual name of your machine—for example, MYSERVER—to avoid known behaviors when there are no name-resolution services available. For related information, see the recommendation for Bypass Proxy settings below.

We recommend that you check the "Bypass proxy server for local addresses checkbox where your network specifies a specific proxy server to use. To do so in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.0, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options. In the Internet Options dialog box, click the Connections tab and then click LAN Settings.

The BizTalk Management Desk will establish a connection to your Web server. In turn, the Web server will connect to the BizTalk management database to set and retrieve data. If the BizTalk Management Desk experiences any problems connecting to its virtual directory on your Web server, it will return an error. Check the following items to ensure a reliable connection to your Web server:

This is a Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) error. The exact error is as follows.
WBEM_E_ACCESS_DENIED0x80041003The current user does not have permission to perform the action.
BizTalk Server Setup was attempting to execute a WMI command. The permissions of the current user were not sufficient to execute that command. The following is a list of things to check to prevent this error:

BizTalk Server can be installed and run on a Windows 2000 Terminal Server–based computer. However, there are some limits to how well BizTalk Server will work on a Terminal Server computer. Be aware of the following points when running BizTalk Server on a Terminal Server computer:

BizTalk Server installs a COM+ package that is run as the Interactive User. If there is no Interactive User, which means no one is logged on to the server console, then the COM+ package will fail. The workaround for this issue is to use a service account with the necessary rights, privileges, and permissions needed to run the COM+ package. To implement such an account:

BizTalk Server can translate a BizTalk Framework message to EDI data (X12 or EDIFACT).

These are the requirements to implement the handling of these types of message in BizTalk Server:

BizTalk Server can be configured to deliver a message to the location specified in the header section of a BizTalk Framework envelope.

These are the requirements for implementing the handling of these types of messages in BizTalk Server:

<biztalk_1 xmlns="urn:schemas-biztalk-org:biztalk:biztalk_1">
<header xmlns="urn:schemas-biztalk-org:biztalk:biztalk_1">
<delivery>
<from>
<address>http://www.btforg.com</address>
</from>
<to>
<address>http://localhost/testo/receiver.asp</address>
</to>
</delivery>
</header>
<body>
.... 
data
.... 
</body>
</biztalk_1> 

BizTalk Server will use the <Address> tag in the <To> section to determine where the data should be delivered. The example above displays an HTTP address. The BizTalk Server 2000 Technology Preview supports only HTTP and FILE. The upcoming beta release of BizTalk Server will support other protocols.

BizTalk Server can translate most flat files (comma separated or positional) to a BizTalk Framework message.

These are the requirements to implement the handling of these types of message in BizTalk Server:

BizTalk Server can translate EDI data (X12 and EDIFACT) to a BizTalk Framework message.

These are the requirements to implement the handling of these types of message in BizTalk Server:

The scripts and samples needed to implement the EDI scenarios and other scenarios are available for downloading. The samples include the following scenarios: