A sharp weapon to eliminate information Islands--biztalk Server

In the information today, all walks of life have built their own websites and a variety of information management systems, such as customer management, inventory management, human resources management and so on. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of our web sites and management systems, between the various management systems of this institution, and the management systems of various institutions are independent of each other. When we are fed up with these fragmented systems, we usually make a bold decision-on ERP (Enterprise resource plan). However, it is not easy to do ERP. It is not only expensive, but also time-consuming and laborious, has a great impact on daily work, and may even endanger the survival and development of enterprises. Is the road of informatization really at the end of the rope? Microsoft's BizTalk Server may be able to bring you to the back of the situation.

The new version of BizTalk Server is based on the. NET development platform, using XML as the standard to connect the source and end of information. For systems connected to the enterprise, called EAI (Enterprise application integration), the systems that connect the various institutions are called business-to-business integrations (business-to-business integration). BizTalk Server currently has two major versions, namely, BizTalk Server 2004 based on Visual Studio. Net 2003 and BizTalk Server 2006 based on Visual Studio 2005. Here's a quick look at how BizTalk Server works.

Biztalk server to connect the systems, it is necessary to exchange data, which has data inflow and outflow. The data that flows in BizTalk Server is called a message. The receiving message is issued by a system that is received by the BizTalk Server using the receiving adapter, and after processing, the sending message is sent to an application system using the send adapter.

The Receive adapter (recieve Adapter) is used to handle different types of messages, such as a text file taken from a folder, a message that is obtained from a server's Web services, and possibly from an FTP server. Some messages are obtained through HTTP requests, and some messages may be obtained directly from the database. It is because of the receiving adapter that Biztalk Servers can be connected to a. NET program in a Windows system or Java programs running on a UNIX platform; the types of messages you can receive from text files to databases, from Web services to HTTP requests, from FTP services to e-mail systems.

The adapter only receives and sends the function, the message classification, the authentication as well as the encryption decryption, the encoding decoding function is by the pipeline (pipelines) to complete. Encryption, decryption, coding and decoding have certain standards, developers do not have to bother; the classification and validation of messages need to be defined by the developer creating a schema (schema). When the receiving pipeline receives the message, it must first decrypt and decode it to get the original data stream. Then, the data stream is parsed according to the designed architecture, and if the appropriate schema is found and fully compliant, it is saved to a database called MessageBox, awaiting business processing.

Biztalk server presents the business process (orchestration) concept. A business process provides tools and processes for processing data items in a message, including loops, branching and parallel processes, expression calculations, invoking rule settings, and so on, and provides workflow support. The development of business processes does not require writing a large amount of code, but is designed using a set of visual tools provided. After the orchestration process is completed, the send pipeline is used to encode, encrypt, and send the sending adapter to the specified application system.

In addition, BizTalk provides an SSO (single Sign-On) service to ensure that each system is organically linked. Use it to create user credentials for each system to log on to different systems.