BizTalk for B2B Integration

I have worked on several integrations now, some using direct point to point integration using SOAP and restful services while others using BizTalk's service bus capabilities. Although BizTalk provides a plethora of integration options it is a myth that the solution it provides is unnecessarily complex. In my opinion the extensibility and long term out of box capabilities it provides outrun the need to use any other solution or even a custom made one.
 
BizTalk has been Microsoft's enterprise service bus solution for quite a while now, starting with BizTalk 2000, way back in the year 2000 to BizTalk 2013 R2 that is currently being shipped in the year 2014. The BizTalk Adapter's work in conjunction with the core publish/subscribe engine to accept messages from a wide variety of formats, transports and transport protocols. The recent Microsoft Azure solution for BizTalk, called MABS (Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services) is the cloud PAAS solution for integration needs. While BizTalk remains the strong contender for Enterprise on-premise B2B and EAI integrations, MABS is the choice for Cloud based scalable service bus.
 
I have been using BizTalk in the last 2 years for B2B integrations in my present company now that requires integrations with many Finance, HR, ERP and partner line of businesses (LOB Apps). Not just BizTalk supports these domains by providing adapters such as for SAP and formats such as EDI, it also provides certain key features such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Orchestration.
 
BizTalk has a variety of Adapters:
  1. FILE
  2. HTTP
  3. WCF
  4. NETTCP
  5. SAP
  6. SMTP
  7. MSMQ
  8. SQL
The rich variety covers most of those used by enterprises. It also supports formats such as XML, Flat-file, EDI along with supporting transport protocols such as AS2 along with HTTPS.


The BAM solution provides tracking capabilities using BAM Activities and Views that help record and track milestones for your activity and data items received at those milestones. It also allows to record the data in the form of aggregates and durations. The BAM alerts configured on top of BAM activities are useful to provide alerting capabilities to operations team in case of SLA violations.


BizTalk Orchestration Engine is actually a workflow engine that allows participation in the message flow. It also has support correlation, transactional and exception handling behaviors.


Few good resources about BizTalk are provided here:
  1. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/biztalk/
  2. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/aa937640.aspx


For MABS:
  1. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/biztalk-services/

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