In the next chapter we'll introduce a hypothetical business devoted to the installation and upkeep of residential services - for example, pool care. We'll use this example over the course of several chapters and build a sample system to illustrate the core services and tools of BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server Features

So just what do we want from a BizTalk Server? Obviously we want an ability to understand and process BizTalk message documents. But we need to think about what application integration really involves beyond this if we are to understand the features included in Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Lets start at the top. We have a business process consisting of separate applications (or islands of automation as they were described earlier in the chapter), which may span across internal organizations, or across businesses. Each of these applications needs to communicate information to the others via network messages. This implies that our Server needs to provide tools to perform at least three functions related to the management of the full business process (the workflow):

• Define the workflow
• Control the flow of messages throughout the workflow
• Monitor the workflow

Now let's consider the messages themselves. We need tools to control the format and movement of messages by:

• Defining message specifications
• Defining translations from one message specification to another
• Controlling message exchange and translation
• Monitoring message content

With these requirements in mind, lets get an overview of the tools available to us in Microsoft BizTalk Server.

BizTalk Server Tools: An Overview

The product itself consists of eight tools, most of which are graphical user interfaces:

• Orchestration Designer is a Visio-based graphical tool for defining workflows into files called XLANG schedules (pronounced slang). The runtime process that hosts instances of these workflow schedules is called the XLANG Scheduler.
• Editor is a graphical tool for defining message formats (BizTalk Framework-compliant and otherwise), termed specifications that are used to initialize the parts of the messaging system that read and write messages.
• Mapper is a graphical tool for designating how messages are mapped from one message format to another, so that BizTalk Server can translate between formats automatically.
• Messaging Manager is a graphical management tool used to configure BizTalk Messaging Services to exchange documents between organizations. Messaging Services is a runtime server process that implements message exchange and data transformation as specified in Messaging Manager.
• Document Tracking is a browser-hosted interface which provides the ability to query for reports on messages passing through Messaging Services.
• Server Administration is a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console that allows system administrators to manage the properties of servers and server groups, as well as message queues and receive functions (more about these topics later in the chapter).

You should be able to see that we have tools to fulfill every requirement stated in the previous section. Having whetted your appetite, we'll now finish the chapter with a tour of most of these tools. We'll also examine how BizTalk Server implements messaging, which will help us to understand the significance of the configuration options available to us through BizTalk Server's tools.