BizTalk at the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals on April 17th
This past Monday was a meeting of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals, and we featured Karl Rissland, a Microsoft BizTalk technical specialist. Karl was a great presenter and I'm only sorry that I was so late getting the newsletter out because we didn't have a very large crowd.
Another reason we might have had a fairly small crowd is that lots of people don't really understand what BizTalk does or what it can be used for. If you listen to any of the BizTalk technical specialists, including Karl, you'll hear "Business Process Orchestration" mentioned over and over, but what does that really mean? Let's step back and look at this from the perspective of the average mid-sized company developer.
Have you ever written an interface program? Something that takes data from one system and moves it into a different system, possibly requiring some sort of transformation or parsing of data? Perhaps you're moving data from a Point of Sale system into a home office Marketing database, or maybe you're moving data from the HR system to some kind of inventory tracking system. Or there is the classic example of moving data from some kind of sales system into some kind of order fufillment system. Basically, you have data elements in point A that need to move to point B. Who hasn't done this at least once in their careers? It's not terribly hard, you write code to grab data, match it to some sort of data element map, and then put the data somewhere else. If you work at a company with five or six systems, each of which needs to talk to at least one other system, you're talking about a minimum of three of these interfaces. This kind of inter-application wire-up is called EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and BizTalk can make this easier for you by providing all the hard parts.
Where BizTalk really shines though is when you want to do more than just pass a simple file around. Let's say you have a company policy that when a new person gets hired, they visit HR to get entered into the HR system and the Payroll system. Then they visit IT to get a domain account and to get a workstation and telephone assigned. If you think of this in terms of EAI, you've got at least three connections to make - HR <--> Payroll <--> IT (and IT here is probably 3 different systems or databases - Active Directory, Telephone Directory, and some kind of inventory tracking database). Now, if you think of this in terms of a business process that you're facilitating, the "New Hire" process, you can start to see how you might be able to pull this stuff together. Let's say that the new hire visits HR and they stick him into their system. Now BizTalk could get a message from the HR system saying "I've got a new hire" and it could begin to automatically do the work in the payroll system as well as work in some of the IT systems. Domain accounts could be added (BizTalk can do more than pass database messages around, you can run code or scripts). Telephone assignment notices could be filed with the appropriate IT staffer, who could update the records once the line is connected. There is a lot that can be done here, and this process of encapsulating an entire business process and managing several details and decisions is called Business Process Orchestration.
Now, if you want to hear someone who really knows what they're talking about explain how all of this really works, we need to invite Karl to come back and present a more in-depth view of BizTalk and what it can do for you. This is a tool that every developer should understand. I'm not saying that every developer will use BizTalk or that it's appropriate for every situation, but this is another significant tool in the toolbox. Knowing a wide array of tools (or at least knowing that they exist and what they're for) can never hurt anyone.