This product is what we will be talking about for the rest of this
book. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 is a collection of tools and
server software that enables us to implement application integration
efficiently. It runs on the Microsoft Windows environment, but it is
important to note that the Server is not restricted to integrating
Windows applications; it is sufficiently open to work with data
coming from or going to other platforms. In the next chapter we'll
introduce a hypothetical business devoted to the installation and
upkeep of residential services - for example, pool care. We'll use
this example over the course of several chapters and build a sample
system to illustrate the core services and tools of BizTalk
Server.
BizTalk Server Features
So just what do we want from a BizTalk Server? Obviously we want
an ability to understand and process BizTalk message documents. But
we need to think about what application integration really involves
beyond this if we are to understand the features included in
Microsoft BizTalk Server.
Lets start at the top. We have a business process consisting of
separate applications (or islands of automation as they were
described earlier in the chapter), which may span across internal
organizations, or across businesses. Each of these applications needs
to communicate information to the others via network messages. This
implies that our Server needs to provide tools to perform at least
three functions related to the management of the full business
process (the workflow):
q
Define the workflow
q
Control the flow of messages throughout the workflow
q
Monitor the workflow
Now let's consider the messages themselves. We need tools to
control the format and movement of messages by:
q
Defining message specifications
q
Defining translations from one message specification to another
q
Controlling message exchange and translation
q
Monitoring message content
With these requirements in mind, lets get an overview of the tools
available to us in Microsoft BizTalk Server.
BizTalk Server Tools: An Overview
The product itself consists of eight tools, most of which are
graphical user interfaces:
q
Orchestration Designer is a Visio-based graphical tool for
defining workflows into files called XLANG schedules (pronounced
slang). The runtime process that hosts instances of these
workflow schedules is called the XLANG Scheduler.
q
Editor is a graphical tool for defining message formats
(BizTalk Framework-compliant and otherwise), termed specifications,
that are used to initialize the parts of the messaging system that
read and write messages.
q
Mapper is a graphical tool for designating how messages are
mapped from one message format to another, so that BizTalk Server can
translate between formats automatically.
q
Messaging Manager is a graphical management tool used to
configure BizTalk Messaging Services to exchange documents between
organizations. Messaging Services is a runtime server process
that implements message exchange and data transformation as specified
in Messaging Manager.
q
Document Tracking is a browser-hosted interface which provides
the ability to query for reports on messages passing through
Messaging Services.
q
Server Administration is a snap-in for the Microsoft
Management Console that allows system administrators to manage the
properties of servers and server groups, as well as message queues
and receive functions (more about these topics later in the
chapter).
You should be able to see that we have tools to fulfill every
requirement stated in the previous section. Having whetted your
appetite, we'll now finish the chapter with a tour of most of these
tools. We'll also examine how BizTalk Server implements messaging,
which will help us to understand the significance of the
configuration options available to us through BizTalk Server's
tools.
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