In today's world, most of the modern business processes, in some way, depend on software systems. To automate these business processes it is necessary to connect various software systems. Following things should be considered when integrating these systems:

  • Connect to diverese systems using different approaches. That is, while for some systems we may utilize web services to connect each other, for some other it will still makes sense to connect them using a simple file share. There could also be some other approaches as MSMQ, etc. Also these business processes need to interact with Line of Business (LOB) applications such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, J D Edwards etc.
  • Centralized Integration platform to support the execution of the automated process.
  • Industry standards based integration approach such as utilizing EDI etc.
  • Allow realtime monitoring of business processes.

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is the fifth release of BizTalk Server line and it builds upon its predecessor to do the above and many other things in better way. Following are the new important features in this version.

  • Solid support for B2B integration using EDI and AS2. Includes Partner Agreement Manager (PAM) for managing and configuring partner specific EDI parameters.
  • Support for applications that work with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) using RFID Server. RFID Server provides standard called Device Service Provider Interface (DSPI) SDK for RFID hardware manufacturers to implement support for their products.
    Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) based adapters, built as WCF Channels.
  • BizTalk Adapter pack that includes WCF Adapters for SAP, Oracle and Siebel. All these adapters are created using WCF LOB SDK - a generalized framework for creating LOB Adapters. These adapters can also be used from any non-BizTalk .Net application.
  • Support for extracting BAM data from applications built using WCF and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
  • WCF Service consuming and publishing wizard

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 is supported on Windows 2000 Server; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 Operating Systems.

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 released in September 2007 and is available in 4 different editions - Enterprise, Standard, Branch and Developer.

Get your evaluation copy here.