Learn BizTalk

What you should already know
Introduction
    Overview
How can a business use BizTalk?
    Sending and receiving data
    What about EDI?
    BizTalk supports EDI
The different phases of the Internet
    Evolutionary or revolutionary?
XML is the message
Applications inside BizTalk
    BizTalk Management Desk
    Agreement Editor
    BizTalk Editor
    BizTalk Mapper
Well done!

What you should already know

To read and understand this a basic understanding of Internet concepts and online business trading practices would be useful.

Introduction

So, we have heard that BizTalk is one of the key's to the next generation of technologies… but what exactly is it?

When people ask what BizTalk is, trainers or salespeople may be inclined to answer: 'it is a set of tools enabling business-to-business exchange'.  But in order to truly understand the power and usefulness of BizTalk, try to think of BizTalk as plumbing.  This plumbing carries text between participants.

NOTE:  This text is actually XML (or 'eXtensible Markup Language') and it is open and extensible, which means it is a low-risk, stable and reliable way of transporting data.

The participants could be companies, components, applications, parts of an operating system or just about anything which needs access to data!  Just as plumbing has an entry and exit point into buildings or containers, BizTalk also supports many protocols through which it can pass data including SMTP (email), FTP, HTTP, MSMQ (message queuing), EDI (electronic data interchange) and more.

Overview

BizTalk Server 2000 is based on the BizTalk Framework.  The BizTalk Framework is an open framework for B2B (or 'business-to-business exchange'), which is being implemented across all major platforms and most major B2B products from other companies.  In addition to being a leading B2B platform, BizTalk is also a new and impressive improvement over previous programming models and presents costs savings when used in internal IT projects.

NOTE:  While BizTalk can be used in externally focused solutions, it is also ideally suited to internal IT solutions.

Built on the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system, BizTalk Server 2000 (or simply 'BizTalk') provides the infrastructure and tools to enable B2B eCommerce and process integration.  BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging business documents (e.g., purchase orders and invoices) between business applications within or across organizational boundaries.

BizTalk also has another major component, it is a website called BizTalk.org (http://www.biztalk.org) and it is a "repository" and "gateway" for BizTalk to enable disparate business applications to exchange documents with each other.

NOTE:  These documents are defined (or structured) using 'schemas' and right now on BizTalk.org there are hundreds of schemas stored in this 'schema repository'.

How can a business use BizTalk?

There are many different ways in which an organization can use BizTalk.  Some of the ways in which businesses can use BizTalk include:

• Trading partner integration: Web-based or traditional Internet-based electronic data interchange (EDI), supply chain integration, order management, invoicing, and shipping coordination
• Automated procurement: Maintenance repair and operations (MRO) pricing and purchasing, order tracking, and government procurement
• Business-to-business portals: Trading communities, electronic catalog management, content syndication, and post-sale customer management
• Business process integration or exchanges: Commerce site to enterprise resource planning (ERP), commerce site to legacy, and ERP to ERP integration
• Improvement of the company's internal IT development designs and application integration

Sending and receiving data

This is how BizTalk can assist two trading partners to communicate.

There are a variety of ways that BizTalk can send and receive data.  Some of these include:

• SMTP (email)
• HTTP (SOAP)
• SMIME
• FTP
• DCOM
• MSMQ
• SNA
• EDIINT

What about EDI?

Initially, BizTalk will only support the X12 and EDIFACT flavors of EDI and it is important to understand that EDI and BizTalk are not competitors.  EDI is effectively the forerunner of non-XML and non-Internet messaging.  BizTalk is the plumbing which underlies the online XML messaging world. 

BizTalk (and by extension, the company using BizTalk) is "aware" of the contents of the documents being transferred (this is due to the use of schemas, namespaces and XML in general) and can react to those contents based on rules.  Extensive support for data mining and profiling is provided by both BizTalk and the other Windows DNA applications.  (EDI essentially moves a closed document from one location to another.)

Unlike EDI, BizTalk supports a wide range of widely and freely available and inexpensive to use Internet protocols (such as FTP, email and HTTP) and can be fully configured to try one or another route to the destination based on the urgency of the delivery.

Like MSMQ (or 'Microsoft Message Queue') BizTalk can guarantee the delivery of documents and includes configuration features to set the order of delivery of dependant documents.

BizTalk supports EDI

EDI has seen significant growth over the recent years, but with these benefits, it is no surprise that research shows the following growth in Internet based transaction revenues, as contrasted to EDI based transaction revenues:

BizTalk supports the following EDI features:

• The ability to parse EDI and route documents based on standard EDI identifiers
• Transformation of EDI (initially to X12 and EDIFACT only) to any other format (XML, flat file, and so on)
• Transformation of any other format to EDI
• Ability to create EDI and wrap it with standard envelopes, including control numbers
• Support for EDI data types, code lists, and syntax rules
• Ability to parse EDI and route documents based on standard EDI identifiers.
• Database lookup/cross-reference functionality supported by BizTalk Mapper and server core
• Acknowledgement generation and correlation

The different phases of the Internet

Let's take a closer look at how business on the Internet has progressed and this may identify for us what the key factors are in successful online business-to-business communications using BizTalk.

The table below shows the overlapping progressive focus shifting away from the early "presence" website, to vertically interconnected "eProcess" business systems by the year 2005.

The progression is from static brochures, through applications such as purchasing, systems integration and communities, to eCommerce and auctions or automatic order fulfilment.  This is an impressive and important concept, that this progress shows:  the speed, flexibility and automation of business is steadily increasing.  Essentially, more can be done using IT (or 'information technology') than ever before.

The key issue in terms of BizTalk is the 4^th column (2000-2005) is where BizTalk will be most active and will a low cost, integrated solution into most online businesses.

Evolutionary or revolutionary?

One of the long time "norms" (or is it really only an expectation?) of computing thus far, is that each new major step forward in computing is accompanied by a new language which a particular company owns… consumers get used to mobbing from one language to another, re-developing their exiting investments and so in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest opportunity.

In this way, a proprietary new development language is usually the key to merging the "old" (code, objects and applications) with the "new".  Some call that 'lock-in', but this is where the old cycle ends!

The dependencies in the future will not be as tight as this diagram indicates:

BizTalk will protect your investments and will enable your company to move beyond beyond that expensive paradigm.  With XML messaging between BizTalk Servers, services, applications, devices and many other objects written in a variety of languages can communicate between themselves… without succumbing to one or another proprietary language!

In this new loosely-coupled messaging paradigm, the new design looks like this:

This the internal design of a BizTalk message:

as you can see, the data in the message is held in the "business documents" which is inside the "document body".

XML is the message

Let's focus on the "why" of XML messaging rather than the "how".  The key trends to identify which have led to this exciting, extensible and platform/programming language-agnostic follow on from the reasons why HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) has become so popular… these reasons include:

• the simplicity of learning and using HTML
• the low cost of designing, setting up and maintaining advertising type websites
• the increasingly huge number of people and businesses connected to the Internet

The reasons for the success of XML (extensible Markup Language) follow on very neatly from those posed for the rise and rise of HTML.  The success is clearly shown by this exponential increase in DNS (Domain Name Service) entries.

DNS entries are URLs (Uniform Resource Location) such as http://www.microsoft.com.

Date:                                                      Number of DNS hosts:

1988                                                        30 000

January 1993                                         1,313,000 

July 1993                                                1,776,000

January 1994                                         ;2,217,000

July 1994                                                3,212,000

January 1995                                         5,846,000

July 1995                                                8,200,000

January 1996                                         14,352,000

July 1996                                                16,729,00

January 1997                                         21,819,000

July 1997                                                26,053,000

January 1998                                         29,670,000

July 1998                                                36,739,000

January 1999                                         43,230,000

July 1999                                                56,218,000

The stunning growth shown during the nineties has continued through the twenties (2000) and into 2001.  Domain usage will continue to grow... people will continue to buy domains for themselves, their family and companies will increasingly buy domains for their products, services and ideas.

But as the use of HTML has grown, the need for XML has intensified also.  Some of the most common reasons for using XML include:

• a desire to communicate in non-proprietary and standards-based way (this is achieved using XML)
• to expose data over the Internet in a controlled and useful way
• to exchange data between business systems in an automated, process-driven way
• to enable software development which spans companies and spans relationships while supporting roles, rules and change

As you can see in the image below, technology, innovation and the very human (and also a business-driven need) to communicate, has moved the Internet from connectivity, through presentation or brochure-style websites, and now into the era of programming for (and on) the web using toolsets like BizTalk.

This figure shows how the Internet has grown from connectivity, through presentation and now to being an environment where programmers are creating web services to consume and serve data.

In order to achieve this business exchange of data via web services, the data format of choice will be XML.

Applications inside BizTalk

BizTalk is not one integrate package - even though it comes in one box - so what are the applications and what do they do?

BizTalk Management Desk

Microsoft BizTalk Management Desk is a Web-based graphical user interface (UI) that can be used either on the server or remotely across the Internet to manage the relationships between trading partners. It makes it easy for businesses to create and manage relationships with trading partners, which is essential to building a successful e-commerce solution.

BizTalk Management desk provides support and management for the following scenarios:

• Trading partner to internal application. This scenario involves a transaction where one organization creates an agreement and sends a document to another organization's BizTalk Server 2000, which then creates and sends a second document to its own internal application.
• Internal application to trading partner. This scenario involves a transaction in which an organization creates an agreement and sends a document from its own internal application to BizTalk Server 2000, and then creates and sends a second agreement to another organization.
• Internal application to internal application. An organization creates an agreement and sends a document from its own internal application to BizTalk Server 2000, which then translates, transforms, and sends the document to another internal application.
• Trading partner through VAN to trading partner. One organization creates an agreement and sends a document to another organization, but uses a VAN receive address. Then, the VAN completes its services and sends the document on to the intended trading partner organization with the originating organization stamped as the sender.
• Internal application to distribution list. An organization creates an agreement and sends a document from its own internal application to BizTalk Server 2000. BizTalk Server 2000 receives the document, and then sends it on to a group of organizations as designated in the agreements of a distribution list.
• Internal application to open destination. An agreement is created and a document is sent from an organization's internal application to an open destination. The information regarding the intended destination organization or destination application is obtained from the data or the contents of the header of the document.
• Open source to internal application. An agreement is created and sent from an unknown organization or application to an organization's internal application. The information regarding the source application is obtained from the data or the contents of the header of the document.

Agreement Editor

You can use the Agreement Editor in BizTalk Management Desk to create new agreements among trading partner organizations and internal applications. An agreement represents the fundamental rules, as agreed upon by the source organization and destination organization, which regulate electronic data exchanges from the source to the destination organization.

In an agreement, you can specify a source organization and a destination organization, or you can explicitly declare it as an open agreement. An open agreement can specify an open source or an open destination, but not both. You can also select document definitions, which indicate the types of documents that the source organization can send to the destination, and specify how those documents should be formatted, secured, and transported.

BizTalk Editor

Microsoft BizTalk Editor is a tool that you can use to create and edit specifications. BizTalk Editor uses XML to combine XML-Data with a document content description (DCD). XML provides a common vocabulary that conveys syntactic, database, and conceptual schemas. A DCD specifies the rules that include the structure and content of XML files.

The BizTalk Editor creates specifications by interpreting the properties of the records and fields contained in the file. Specifications, which include XML-Data Reduced (XDR) schemas, represent the structured data as XML regardless of the original format. In addition, BizTalk Editor specifications provide common data descriptions that Microsoft BizTalk Mapper can use to transform data across dissimilar formats, and they provide data portability across business processes. 

A specification created by using BizTalk Editor can be based on any of the following:

• EDI (ANSI X12 and EDIFACT).
• Flat files, including hierarchical, delimited, and positional files (for example, SAP and IDOCS). A file flat could also be both delimited and positional.
• Well-formed XML.
• XML-Data or document type definitions (DTDs).
• Structured document formats.
• XML-based document templates.

Using BizTalk Editor, you can create new specifications either by starting with a blank specification, which contains no structure, or by importing an existing schema or specification. You may, for example, import a DTD, which is a structured file that denotes the elements and attributes that may be present in other elements and attributes, as well as any constraints on their ordering, frequency, and content. A standard specification, such as ANSI X12, EDIFACT, or well-formed XML, may also be used to create a new specification.

BizTalk Mapper

At run time, BizTalk Server 2000 uses a map, which is created by using BizTalk Mapper, to translate incoming and outgoing data to and from a specification.

Microsoft BizTalk Mapper is a translation tool that is used to map records and fields between two different specification formats.

BizTalk Mapper accomplishes this translation by using links and functoids, which are capable of a range of functions from simple calculations to elaborate script functionality. 

With BizTalk Mapper, you can graphically depict the structural-transformation relationship between source-specification data elements and destination-specification data elements. This cross-reference and data-manipulation functionality creates a map file, which is a set of instructions that define the relationship between two different specification formats.

Well done!

You are now well on your way to understanding BizTalk and working with it.  Read the further reading examples in the focus area.