Business processes such as ordering, invoicing, and inventory tracking are the fundamental actions of e-commerce. Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 enables knowledge workers to gather specific or aggregated real-time information about the state of a business process. For example, they can find out why a specific customer order was processed but not shipped, or how many units of a product were sold and shipped in the previous 48-hour period.

Tracking Profile Editor (TPE) is a key component in the end-to-end business activity monitoring solution that Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 offers. The Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Framework provides an easy, real-time, transaction-consistent way to monitor heterogeneous business applications, and present the data for SQL queries and aggregated reports by using online analytical processing (OLAP) technology. Knowledge workers can use this information to assess the current state of their business so that they can quickly respond to changes.

For example, to troubleshoot a specific customer order or analyze trends of specific business events and milestones in the shipping process, a business analyst can specify the view of the data he wants to see. To extract the data the business analyst requires, the developer uses TPE to perform the mapping between the specific business event data and the actual orchestration. After you create, save, test, and deploy the tracking profile, the business analyst can retrieve the data collected to analyze a specific aspect of a business process.

Before you start working with the Tracking Profile Editor (TPE), we recommend that you understand BizTalk Server and how it works to facilitate communications across different platforms and applications. For information about the range of technologies and features that Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 offers, see BizTalk Server 2004 Conceptual Overview.

As a solution developer, you also need to have specialized knowledge about how the business processes of your organization are implemented using Microsoft BizTalk Server orchestration. You must understand how to use the Orchestration Designer to produce orchestrations. For more information about Microsoft BizTalk 2004 orchestration, see About Orchestration. For more information about valid and invalid orchestration shapes using the TPE, see Best Practices for Tracking Profile Editor.

Important  In order to use TPE, you must use a full or custom BizTalk Server product installation and ensure that your choice includes the "Development Tools Install" option. For more information, see Installing BizTalk Server.

Note  TPE does not track .NET message parts. You cannot view the message schema for these types of messages.

This section contains:

• Creating New Tracking Profiles
• Sample Tracking Profile
• Accessibility for Tracking Profile Editor