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Inside The Microsoft BizTalk Framework - Part One
By Mark Merkow, CCP, CISSP
July 23, 1999

In a March 1999 edition of EC Outlook, we introduced the BizTalk Framework from Microsoft Corp. as a solution to application integration problems and escalating costs in establishing e-commerce. Since March, the developers of BizTalk and the developers of cXML have joined ranks and emerged better prepared to help e-commerce operations -- especially business-to-business e-commerce.

In June 1999, Version 0.81 of the BizTalk Framework was posted at the Biztalk.org Web site, and I''ve since had an opportunity to download and examine it. In this edition of EC Outlook, we''ll peek inside the BizTalk Framework to investigate its possibilities.

Why BizTalk?
As businesses move to customer self-servicing, partnering with external companies, and adopting other Web-based and three-tier client-server based systems, the complexities of processing increase by several orders of magnitude. Managing and using business data is often a precarious task since data is usually found under multiple formats such as:

  • Corporate documents
  • Messages from customers or external partners
  • Interfaces to transaction-based systems
  • Databases (all varieties)
  • Web pages

Because of the lack of a universal interchange format, companies are often restrained from exploiting automation that adds seamless integration between internal applications and external partner applications. As a result, IT departments spend upwards to 40% of their time in extracting, re-defining, and updating data to serve specific needs, according to a survey from Forrester Research.

"To get more than a million new businesses into e-commerce we need to help their software speak the language of business in a consistent way. Up until now it has been extremely difficult for companies to conduct business easily over the Internet because of the lack of a single technology vocabulary for describing business processes. BizTalk provides a framework that will greatly accelerate the adoption of e-commerce because it provides that vocabulary for software across any platform or technology." said Bill Gates, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

The BizTalk Server
The core of the BizTalk Framework is the BizTalk Server. As an application layer service, the BizTalk server provides for:

  • Storage and manipulation of native XML data.
  • High-performance querying capability on large sets of XML-based components.
  • Integration of disparate data sources into unified XML databases that permit querying and updating using well-defined standards.
  • Execution of Document Object Model (DOM) compliant applications using XML data types.
  • Standard interface to Web development languages, including JScript, VBScript, and Java.
  • Single point of administration.
  • Scaleable data distribution functions.

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