Microsoft BizTalk Server Explained in Simple Terms
At TechEd 2008, I manned the Microsoft BizTalk Server booth. Nearly every question I got was, “I’ve heard of BizTalk, but what does it do?”. If you are like me 3 years ago which is sounds like many people are, I wish someone would have just came out and given me a simple description of BizTalk. Now that I know BizTalk, here is the *simple* description/FAQ of what it is and why it is a great product.
What is BizTalk?
BizTalk is a message conversion system. You give it MessageA and it converts it to MessageB. For example, if MessageA is an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) 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.
I can just code this in .NET why do I need BizTalk?
Sure, you can fire up Visual Studio and write this on your own, but did you think about guaranteed delivery, disaster recovery, tracking, troubleshooting, security, or authentication? 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.
I am not doing B2B. Is BizTalk still helpful?
Yes. Many people use BizTalk as an integration platform – meaning all of those old systems that you have that don’t communicate with each other can be bridged together with BizTalk. The marketing term for this is Solution Oriented Architecture (SOA). Also, many companies love BizTalk so much that all of their business logic internally in their company flows through it with the confidence of BizTalk’s ability to make nearly any business process a structured transaction.
BizTalk is *huge*, do I really need all of that infrastructure?
BizTalk is not for everyone. Again, you can certainly write your own .NET application to do very basic message conversion, but once your company matures and needs enterprise level messaging, reliability, and flexibility, then that is when you get BizTalk.
What is BizTalk really good at?
BizTalk is great when dealing with frequent changes in how you do business with other businesses. For example, if you deal with a lot of 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.
You keep talking about “messaging”. Does this mean that BizTalk does email?
The messaging we are talking about would be something like reading in a purchase order from CompanyA and sending the order to your fulfillment and shipping departments. BizTalk can also send email if you want it to, but it’s really designed to get businesses to talk to each other hence why it is called “Biz-Talk”.
Additional Information
One of my colleagues at Microsoft requested that I include information on some of the other features that BizTalk Server provides:
- Multiple adapters provide support for most industry standard transports (FTP, HTTP, File, SOAP, WCF, SQL, etc.)
- Multiple accelerators are available that support for industry standard document formats (HIPAA, EDI, SWIFT)
- RFID Platform
- High availability
- Fault tolerance
- Scalability
- End to end message tracking (including message body tracking if needed.
- Messaging subsystem accommodates transactional messaging, i.e. 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
These features are available in BizTalk Server, which allows you to quickly integrate your business processes with other internal business processes and with external trading partners. Several of these features are described in further detail at https://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/capabilities.aspx.
Thanks to Trace Young (BizTalk Technical Writer) for this bit of information.
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Thanks for the great summary of BizTalk - quite useful for new clients.Anonymous
July 08, 2009
How many companies today use BizTalk?Anonymous
August 19, 2010
thank you so so much. I've been looking up information about biztalk all day and it's only reading this that's got everything to click in my mind!Anonymous
March 05, 2014
Nice informative article...!!!Anonymous
July 07, 2014
Exactly what i was looking for .Nice explanation !!Anonymous
July 16, 2014
Useful linfo,Anonymous
August 12, 2014
Thanks, I've used this as a template to explain what I do for a living to my girlfriend..Anonymous
August 20, 2014
Good very clear explanation but how can I study this and where can I used it to work her is my nail busuyiakin@yahoo.comAnonymous
September 18, 2014
can explain what is scope of biztalk?Anonymous
September 18, 2014
can explain what is scope of biztalk?Anonymous
September 18, 2014
how many clients are there of biztalk?Anonymous
October 15, 2014
Many thanks! Wish we get more of these "What is X ... without the 'marketing' spiel." type articles!
I can now imagine using Biztalk at some point in the future.Anonymous
March 02, 2015
Great articleAnonymous
March 16, 2015
Very good overview on BizTalk. Thanks for writing thisAnonymous
May 16, 2015
Thanks nice articleAnonymous
June 14, 2015
Explain very wellAnonymous
August 12, 2015
Nice article! It explained everything what I wanted to know.
Thanks :)Anonymous
August 25, 2015
Thank you! Just what I was looking for.Anonymous
September 29, 2015
Very good explanation for the novice...great work!!!Anonymous
October 01, 2015
Excellent ArticleAnonymous
October 13, 2015
Very userful articleAnonymous
October 20, 2015
i have b2b application which is generated in java
can i use biztalk seerverAnonymous
November 15, 2015
I am just a newbie in ERP sector and started on Dynamics AX, for the various integration of the System we needed a centralized framework. I got to know about Biz talk, indeed this a great article.Anonymous
January 21, 2016
I have two systems that expose web services for anyone to get data. Can BizTalk be scheduled to call system A, get the data, and then call System B and provide it data?