Introducing BizTalk Server 2006 R2 David Chappell, Chappell & Associates August 2007 © Copyright Microsoft Corporation 2007. All rights reserved.
Contents AN OVERVIEW OF BIZTALK SERVER 2006 R2 ................................................................................. 3 THE CHALLENGE: IMPROVING BUSINESS PROCESSES.................................................................................................. 3 ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGE: WHAT BIZTALK SERVER 2006 R2 PROVIDES ................................................................ 3 Application Integration in a Service-Oriented World .......................................................
An Overview of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 No application is an island. In fact, tying systems together has become the norm in most organizations today. Yet connecting software means more than just exchanging bytes. As organizations continue to move toward a service-oriented world, the real goal—creating effective business processes that unite disparate systems into a coherent whole—comes within reach. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 supports this goal.
Connecting applications within a single organization, commonly referred to as enterprise application integration (EAI). As more organizations move toward service-oriented architecture (SOA), the approach to doing this also becomes increasingly service-oriented. Connecting applications in different organizations, typically referred to as business-to-business (B2B) integration.
document is mapped into another. Once the business analyst has defined this process, a developer can create a BizTalk application that implements it. This includes things such as choosing adapters, defining the data mappings for the business documents that will be used, and creating the orchestrations necessary to implement the process logic. An administrator can then deploy the BizTalk application, set up communication among the systems, and perform other tasks.
Single Sign-on facility. This technology provides a way to map authentication information between Windows and non-Windows systems. A new addition in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is support for applications that work with radio frequency identification (RFID). RFID tags can be attached to pallets in a warehouse, products on a shelf, and many other things, then used by applications to track the tagged items. To help create these applications, the latest release of BizTalk Server includes an RFID server.
manage relationships with EDI partners. BizTalk Server 2006 R2 also provides accelerators to help implement other popular standards, such as RosettaNet, SWIFT, and HL7. Each accelerator includes pre-defined message definitions for the standard, along with relevant guidance and examples. Business Process Management Integrating applications into a single automated business process is a fundamental goal of BizTalk Server 2006 R2.
Like its predecessors, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is focused on connecting applications, i.e., on system workflow. A fundamental tenet of BPM, however, is that most business processes include both system and human workflow. To address this, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 can connect to human workflows running on the latest release of Windows SharePoint Services.
however. Instead, a business analyst or (more likely) a developer uses a graphical tool to create a group of shapes that express conditions, loops, and other behavior. And although it’s not shown in Figure 5, orchestrations can optionally use the BRE to express complex sets of rules. Once an orchestration has processed a message, it typically produces another message destined for some other application. This message is placed in the MessageBox, then picked up by a send port.
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 also includes adapters that implement other commonly used communication mechanisms. The MSMQ Adapter allows sending and receiving messages using Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), for example, while the WebSphere MQ Adapter allows sending and receiving messages using IBM’s WebSphere MQ. Similarly, the SMTP Adapter and the POP3 Adapter allow sending and receiving email using these standard protocols. Other adapters allow interaction via common storage mechanisms.
contain. To make defining XSD schemas easier, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides a tool called the BizTalk Editor. Rather than creating a schema directly in XSD, this editor lets a developer build a schema by defining its elements in a graphical hierarchy. Existing schemas can also be imported from files or Web services. Once messages are in a known XML schema, it’s possible to map between them.
counterparts in the destination schema. Most lines in Figure 8 show this kind of connection. More complex transformations are also possible using functoids. A functoid is a chunk of executable code that can define arbitrarily complex mappings between XML schemas. As the topmost line in Figure 8 shows, the BizTalk Mapper represents a functoid as a box on the line connecting the elements being transformed.
The Loop shape, which allows performing an action repeatedly while some condition is true. The Transform shape, which allows transferring information from one document to another, transforming it on the way by invoking maps defined with the BizTalk Mapper. The Parallel Actions shape, which allows specifying that multiple operations should be performed in parallel rather than in sequence. The shape that follows this one won’t be executed until all of the parallel actions have completed.
Figure 7: The Orchestration Designer lets a developer create business logic by dragging and dropping shapes from a toolbox onto a design surface. SOAP-based Web services have had a big impact on application development. To access an external Web service, an orchestration’s creator might use the Add Web Reference option in Visual Studio along with the SOAP adapter.
The BRE is most useful when a complex set of business rules must be evaluated. Deciding whether to grant a loan, for example, might entail working through a large set of rules based on the customer’s credit history, income, and more. Similarly, determining whether to sell life insurance to an applicant depends on a number of things, including the applicant’s age, gender, and a myriad of health factors.
Creating Scalable Configurations It’s possible to install every component of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 on a single machine. Yet it’s not hard to imagine situations where this isn’t the right solution. Perhaps the number of messages the system must handle is too great for one machine, or maybe redundancy is required to make the system more reliable. To meet requirements like these, the product can be deployed in a number of ways. A fundamental concept for deploying BizTalk Server is the idea of a host.
contains only a single instance of the MessageBox database, it’s possible to replicate this database for greater scalability or cluster it to avoid creating a single point of failure. Managing BizTalk Applications Whatever it does and however it’s configured, every BizTalk application must be managed.
Figure 9: The BizTalk Administration console's Group Hub page lets an administrator monitor and manage running BizTalk applications. The BizTalk Administration console, which uses BizTalk Server 2006 R2’s Configuration database, also provides other services. An administrator can dynamically add machines and specify what hosts should be assigned to them while a BizTalk application is running, for example, without shutting down the application.
Additional BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Technologies The fundamentals of a BizTalk application revolve around messaging and orchestration. The product provides more than this, however, including business activity monitoring, support for working with RFIDs, and more. This section takes a brief look at each of these technologies. Business Activity Monitoring BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides support for automated business processes that span multiple applications.
Figure 10: BAM data can be generated by orchestrations and other .NET applications, then used in a variety of ways. The first of these two aspects, an infrastructure for collecting information about running processes, is provided by BizTalk Server 2006 R2. As Figure 12 shows, BizTalk orchestrations can directly generate BAM data, all of which is sent into a BAM database.
Figure 11: Information displayed via Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 might come from the BAM database Alternatively, an information worker might use BizTalk Server’s BAM portal to select a particular instance of some business process, then choose a specific BAM view into the process. Each of these views can give a different perspective, such as graphical depictions of per-product sales trends or current inventory levels or other key performance indicators.
This support includes several things. First, since different parts of the world use different standards, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 allows using both the X12 standards popular in the United States and the EDIFACT standards that are widely used in Europe and elsewhere. The product also supports the more recent AS/2 standard for exchanging EDI information over the Internet.
Figure 12: The BizTalk RFID server provides a common platform for RFID applications to interact with diverse RFID devices such as readers and printers. Items with attached RFID tags—pallets, passports, or whatever—are shown as red squares at the bottom of Figure 14. Their unique identifiers can be read by handheld readers or by fixed devices, such as a reader mounted on the door of a loading dock.
respond to an event, that response will often take the form of a rule: If this event happens, then perform that action. To make creating this kind of logic easier, developers can use the BizTalk Server BRE. The BizTalk RFID server provides custom vocabularies to help developers create rules for working with RFID. In most cases, an RFID business process will need to communicate with other applications.
Figure 13: Enterprise Single Sign-On allows mapping between a user’s Windows credentials and those required for other systems. In this example, a message sent to a BizTalk application is processed by an orchestration, then sent to an affiliate application running on an IBM mainframe. The job of Enterprise Single Sign-On is to make sure that the correct credentials (e.g., the right username and password) are sent with the message when it is passed to the affiliate application.
Enterprise Single Sign-On also includes administration tools to perform various operations. All operations performed on the credential database are audited, for example, so tools are provided that allow an administrator to monitor these operations and set various audit levels. Other tools allow an administrator to disable a particular affiliate application, turn on and off an individual mapping for a user, and perform other functions.