Microsoft BizTalk Server is an Inter-Organizational Middleware System that enables companies to automate business processes, through the use of adapters which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in an enterprise. Created by Microsoft, it provides enterprise application integration, business process automation, business-to-business communication, message broker and business activity monitoring. BizTalk Server was previously positioned as both an application server and an. Microsoft changed this strategy when they released the AppFabric server which became their official application server. Research firm Gartner consider Microsoft's offering one of their 'Leaders' for Application Integration Suites. The latest release of Biztalk was released on 15th of January 2020. In a common scenario, BizTalk enables companies to integrate and manage automated 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 Microsoft Visual Studio. A developer can create transformation maps transforming one message type to another. For example, an XML file can be transformed to SAP IDocs. Messages inside BizTalk are implemented through the XML documents and defined with the XML schemas in XSD standard. Maps are implemented with the XSLT standard. Orchestrations are implemented with the WS-BPEL compatible process language xLANG. Schemas, maps, pipelines and orchestrations are created visually using graphical tools within Microsoft Visual Studio. The additional functionality can be delivered by.NET assemblies that can be called from existing modules—including, for instance, orchestrations, maps, pipelines, business rules.
Ability to do graphical modelling of business processes in Visual Studio, model documents with XML schemas, graphically mapping between different schemas, and building pipelines to decrypt, verify, parse messages as they enter or exit the system via adapters.
Users can automate business management processes via Orchestrations.
RFID support, as of BizTalk 2006 R2. Deprecated in the 2016 release
Support for Application Insight, as of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1
Automatic deployment through Visual Studio Team Service, as of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1
Exposed management REST APIs with full Swagger support, as of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1
Exposed operational data with Power BI support, as of BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1
Human-centric processes cannot be implemented directly with BizTalk Server and need additional applications like Microsoft SharePoint server.
Architecture
The BizTalk Server runtime is built on a publish/subscribe architecture, sometimes called "content-based publish/subscribe". Messages are published into BizTalk, transformed to the desired format, and then routed to one or more subscribers. BizTalk makes processing safe by serialization - placing messages into a database while waiting for external events, thus preventing data loss. This architecture binds BizTalk with Microsoft SQL Server. Processing flow can be tracked by administrators using an Administration Console. BizTalk supports the transaction flow through the whole line from one customer to another. BizTalk orchestrations also implement long-running transactions.
