Professional Biztalk

The BizTalk Framework is an XML framework for application integration and electronic commerce. Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2000 runs on Windows 2000 Server and is Microsoft's implementation of the framework, with functional extensions. BizTalk Server allows you to perform the three tasks critical in enterprise application integration: design the flow of information through a system, use BizTalk and its interfaces as the glue to perform the actual integration, then track the flow of information through the resulting system. BizTalk Server accomplishes these three tasks by providing the integration code in a central server, removing the need for writing integration code into programs. Much of this work can be done by configuring the server, reducing the amount of time you need to spend programming the integration code, and to achieve integration it can work with delimited and positional flat file formats, EDI documents, and XML. This book teaches you how to use BizTalk Server as an Enterprise Application Integration tool, to integrate applications into co-operating systems. It is especially suited to rapid deployment of B2B and B2C e-commerce applications, where you need to integrate with legacy applications. Who is this book for? This book is for programmers, familiar with developing Microsoft web solutions, who want to integrate existing applications to create enterprise systems. What does this book cover? • How to design the flow of data through an enterprise application • How to use BizTalk Server to integrate applications • How to translate between document formats • How to monitor and track messages in the application • How BizTalk allows you to link heterogeneous platforms together, smoothly and easily