BizTalk Server 2004 Conceptual Overview

Note  The content of this section is based on the white paper "Understanding BizTalk Server 2004" by David Chappell. The paper is published on MSDN® at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=21281. David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=21434) in San Francisco, California. His most recent book, Understanding .NET, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2002.

In today's business environment, it is increasingly important to create business processes that combine separate and diverse applications into a coherent whole. Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 enables you to connect diverse applications, and then use a graphical user interface to create and modify business processes that use services from those applications.

Building on earlier versions, the core BizTalk Server 2004 engine provides expanded capabilities and new services, such as:

• A new way to specify business rules
• Better ways to manage and monitor applications
• Support for single sign-on
• New services for information workers, including:
  • A group of Business Activity Services (BAS) that enable business users to manage their business partners and processes
  • Support for business process provisioning and configuration
  • Services that information workers can use to set up and manage interactions with trading partners
  • Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) features for analyzing running business processes
  • Support for ad-hoc and semi-structured workflow through Human Workflow Services (HWS), which enables you to create business processes that people can interact with through client applications such as Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services, Microsoft Office InfoPath™, and Microsoft Office

Unlike its COM-based predecessors, BizTalk Server 2004 is built completely around the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET. It also has native support for communicating by using Web services, along with the ability to import and export business processes described in Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

You can apply BizTalk Server 2004 to your organization in a variety of ways. When you use BizTalk Server for application integration, the following scenarios are most important:

• Connecting applications within a single organization, commonly referred to as Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
• Connecting applications in different organizations, commonly referred to as business-to-business (B2B) integration

When learning about BizTalk Server 2004, it is useful to divide the product conceptually into two parts: the core engine and the services for information workers that are built on top of that engine: Business Activity Services, Business Activity Monitoring, and Human Workflow Services. This overview provides two simple examples of using BizTalk Server 2004, and then describes the conceptual parts.

This section contains:

• EAI Example
• B2B Example
• BizTalk Server Engine
• Business Activity Services
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
• Human Workflow Services (HWS)