No application is an island. Whether we like it or not, tying systems together has become the norm. Yet connecting software is about more than just exchanging bytes. As organizations move toward a service-oriented world, the real goal—creating effective business processes that unite separate systems into a coherent whole—comes within reach.
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 supports this goal. Like its predecessors, this latest release allows connecting diverse software, then graphically creating and modifying process logic that uses that software. BizTalk Server also enables information workers to monitor running processes, interact with trading partners, and perform other business-oriented tasks.
Key new features in BizTalk Server are:
- Better support for deploying, monitoring, and managing applications
- Significantly simpler installation
- Improved capabilities for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
BizTalk Server also uses the latest releases of other Microsoft technologies. It's built on version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, for example, and the developer tools are hosted in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. For storage, BizTalk Server can use SQL Server 2008 R2, the latest version of Microsoft's flagship database product. BizTalk Server 2010 can also run on 64-bit Windows Servers, taking advantage of the larger memory and other benefits that this new generation of hardware offers.
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