The first Beta version of Microsofts new BizTalk Server has been released today.

Microsoft BizTalk Server, often referred to as simply “BizTalk”, is a business process management (BPM) server. Through the use of “adapters” which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in a large enterprise, it enables companies to automate and integrate business processes. Offered by Microsoft, it provides the following functions: Business Process Automation, Business Process Modeling, Business-to-business Communication, Enterprise Application Integration and Message broker.

In a common scenario, BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging business documents such as purchase orders and invoices between disparate applications, within or across organizational boundaries.

Development for BizTalk Server is done through Visual Studio .NET.

Features

• The use of adapters to simplify integration to Line of Business Applications (eg. Siebel, SAP, IFS Applications, JD Edwards, Oracle), Databases (Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2) and other Technologies (Tibco, J2EE, etc)
• An engine for modelling Business Rules in a pseudo-English format. This is a forward chaining rule engine.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), which allows a dashboard, graphical view on how the modelled Business Processes are doing.
• A unified Administration Dashboard for monitoring deployments of solutions, etc on BizTalk servers in your environment.
• Built-in EDI(Electronic Data Interchange) functionality supporting X12,HIPAA and EDIFACT.
• Accelerators which offer support for standards like RosettaNet, HL7, SWIFT, etc.
• Ability to do graphical modelling of business processes in visual studio, graphically mapping (with the assistance of functoids) between different message formats, and building pipelines to decrypt, verify, parse messages as they enter the system via adapters.
• Users can automate business management processes via Orchestrations.
• BizTalk integrates with other Microsoft products like Office, InfoPath and SharePoint to allow interaction with a user participating in a workflow process.
• Extensive support for Webservices (consuming and exposing)
• RFID support

The BizTalk Server runtime is built on a publish/subscribe architecture, sometimes called “content-based publish/subscribe”. Messages are published into the system, and then received by one or more active subscribers.

BizTalk uses adapters for communications with different protocols, and specific software products such as SharePoint. Some of the adapters that were included in Server 2006 product included the Base EDI (Covast), File, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, SOAP, SQL, MSMQT, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0, and the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) adapters. Some are available through third parties.

The BizTalk Server 2009 Beta is available for download on Microsoft Connect.
https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=218