BizTalk Overview

Introduction

• Microsoft BizTalk Server provides a development and execution environment that orchestrates business processes, both within and among businesses. BizTalk Server can handle business transactions that run as long as weeks or months.
  
  
• BizTalk Server features include the ability to define business document specifications and how these documents need to be transformed when passed among applications and the ability to monitor and log server activity.
  
  
• The server provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents across the internet, as well as providing a range of services that ensures data integrity, delivery and security.
  
  
• Microsoft BizTalk Server is an integration server product that enables you to develop, deploy and manage integrated business processes and XML-based Web services.
  
  
• Microsoft BizTalk Server enables you to connect diverse applications and then to graphically create and modify business processes that use the services that those applications provide.
  
  
• BizTalk Server engine provides a mechanism for specifying business rules, better ways to manage and monitor the applications built on it.
  
  
• BizTalk supports many built-in data adapters. (SOAP, Message Queuing, FTP, HTTP, SMTP, SQL, EDI, File).
  
  
• BizTalk supports many data formats (database, formatted text, HL7, XML).
  
  
• BizTalk engine use XML for all internal processing.

Need for Biz talk

• BizTalk is great when dealing with frequent changes in how you do business with other businesses. For example, if you deal with many businesses that have different message requirements, frequent network protocol changes, then BizTalk is for you. Also, many customers really like how easy it is to map the schemas of messages. For example, FName in MessageA can be easily mapped to FirstName in MessageB regardless of how the messages are structured.
  
  
• What if the network protocol to receive and send these messages needs to change? How long would it take to change your custom application compared to a simple configuration change (no recompile necessary) in BizTalk. When you keep creating monolithic applications to handle your business to business (B2B) transactions, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage it and you find yourself trying to write an infrastructure to handle it. BizTalk provides all of this infrastructure for you. It has guaranteed delivery, standardized tracking, a business rules engine, redundancy and much more.
  
  
• BizTalk is a message conversion system. You give it MessageA and it converts it to MessageB. For example, if MessageA is an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) message, then BizTalk is able to easily read the message and convert it into just about any other message type such as an XML document (MessageB). Will it convert a Word document to a PDF document? It can, but it was really designed to allow businesses to easily communicate with each other using practically any message format and nearly any network protocol.

Benefits

• Multiple adapters provide support for most industry standard transports (FTP, HTTP, File, SOAP, WCF, SQL and so on).
  
  
• Multiple accelerators are available that support industry standard document formats (HIPAA, EDI and SWIFT).
  
  
• RFID Platform
  
  
• High availability
  
  
• Fault tolerance
  
  
• Scalability
  
  
• End to end message tracking (including message body tracking if needed).
  
  
• Messaging subsystem accommodates transactional messaging, in other words BizTalk can send to/receive from trading partners within the context of a distributed transaction as long as the adapter supports transactions.
  
  
• XLANGs workflow engine.
  
  
• Business Activity Monitoring.
  
  
• Business Rule Engine (BRE).
  
  
• Management functionality via Management console.
  
  
• Integration with MOM
  
  
• Integration with Enterprise Single Sign-On.

BizTalk 2013 new features (please find more details in the following link).

1. BizTalk 2013 Support Restful Services.
2. WCF-Web Http Adapter.
   
   It support Restful Services and also the number of mobile devices with light weight rich (Ajax) web applications..
   
   
   
   
3. Integrating BizTalk Server 2013 with Salesforce.
4. Processing JSON messages using BizTalk Server.
   
   
   
   
5. Enterprise Application Integration.
   
   Microsoft BizTalk Server provides a development and run-time environment for application integration and Business Process Management (BPM).