15

I've been given the job of setting up a Microsoft BizTalk staging server for our developers to test some integration for a client.

The catch is, I have no idea what BizTalk is, what it does, or what it is used for. Everything I can read about it on the Microsoft website is all just marketing fluff as far as I can tell, with lots of big enterprisey words (sentences like "BizTalk enables your organization to seamlessly integrate disparate systems and connect business partners")

Can anyone shed some light on what BizTalk actually does? Our developers don't know either, only that they have to integrate with it!

Mark Henderson
  • 68,316
  • 31
  • 175
  • 255
  • Thank you for this question! I was looking for a brief meaningful and comprehensible description of BizTalk and couldn't find one! – ZweiBlumen Aug 30 '13 at 10:02

4 Answers4

11

Biztalk allows applications to talk to each other. It is used for sharing information or events between applications or systems that are needed to work together in a business process.

It provides a way of mapping inputs and outputs of different systems, for example when they use incompatible protocols or formats. I believe this is done in XML. It also provides collections of scripts or procedures, called orchestrations, that allow a set of actions to occur in target systems when triggered by something happening in another system.

It's an implementation of an enterprise service bus, which is a platform for building a service oriented architecture - if that helps...

William
  • 1,158
  • 8
  • 9
3

To understand better the concepts of enterprise application integration I highly recommend you this book.

It gives an overview over all patterns you will see, and some input about the different competitor of the market (Tibco, Biztalk, and something from IBM I forgot the name).

Nicolas Dorier
  • 298
  • 1
  • 3
  • 9
0

You can use it as basically anything, but I'd wager quite a few bucks that EDI is chief amongst Biztalk installations.

Basically; doing the translation between different e-commerce (b2b orders, invoices, what-not) file formats; thereby extending the domain of whatever ERP-ish software companies use.

Morten Bergfall
  • 111
  • 5
0

In concise terms is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern that contains orchestration of services, messaging transformation and a service broker. It allows big companies to basically expose a web service or functional service and through communication channels communicate disparate information among all sorts of systems. ie:

  • communicate a very old AS/400 DB with a C++ based processing software.
  • integrate a j2ee web app with a BPM platform to trigger business processes
  • perform some CRUD DB operations by request. (ie. obtain Total of employers with SOA certification)

Biztalk is not commonly used at the moment (2018) and other competitors have overtaken that integration space. competitors such as TIBCO, IBM, Amazon, Mulesoft.

Andre Leon Rangel
  • 121
  • 5