Biztalk RFID - Part 1
well, let's start exploring the world of RFID support inside Biztalk Server. if you are new to the RFID technologies , there are few stuff that you need to know before you enter this world, first of all, RFID stands for "Radio Frequency Identification" (i recommend reading this article on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Frequency_Identification.) to put it in simple words, there are reader and there are the tags that pass through the readers, tags could be active, passive and semi-passive tags, the main difference is in the range of each tag and whether the tag has a power source or not. Passive tags have no power source and they have a relatively short range, they get activated by the actual radio waves when they hit the tag and that interruption of the radio wave is received back by the reader along with the data <<byte stream>> stored on the tag. definitely there is a lot more details in that !! however, we will keep it as simple as this is this stage.
so, Why Biztalk RFID ? what did people usually do before Biztalk RFID ? ,, well, typically each hardware provider has it's own drivers and hence it's own APIs to communicate with it's readers, so a developer would need to write custom code that reads/writes to the tags through the reader. so what happens if the solution uses different types of Readers ? you will have to write different pieces of code for each type of reader; the other solution is to write a custom middleware solution that can read from different readers. That's exactly where Biztalk RFID fits ! , it gives you this Abstraction layer that hides the specifics of the different hardware devices and along with the flexibility of coding against a single platform. currently we support all the major hardware providers, more hardware partners are added as we grow.
so, i guess the next question will be, why have these RFID capabilities inside Microsoft Biztalk Server ? why not a separate product that does that ? , i'll try to give my own opinions on that.
- Reading Tags are in most of the cases part of a larger Business Process Management Solution (Inventory Management, Asset Tracking, Human Tracking , etc. ) accordingly , it makes perfect sense to have this feature as part of Microsoft's BPM Server (which is BizTalk)
- In Enterprise Solutions you would probably need to take these tag reads and send them to an ERP Solution or enrich the tag information with other data coming from existing LOB applications. so, coupling this with BizTalk lets you leverage all the enterprise connectivity capabilities found inside Biztalk.
- In environments with high volumes of tag Reads; performance in terms of latency & Throughput could be an issue, i have seen requirements that need sub millisecond responses where tag reads are used to open security gates !!!, having a enterprise class scalable middleware is definitely a must.
i guess we have now covered the What ? and the Why ?, in the next article we will start exploring the "How" and drill deeper in the architecture of the product.. don't worry no Biztalk knowledge is required at this stage :)
Cheers
Ahmed Farrag
Addiontioanl Resources
www.microsoft.com/rfid
