Product Positioning - CSF and BizTalk Server

2007-03-29T23:30:00Z

There has been a lot of confusion about the product positioning of the Connected Services Framework and BizTalk Server. I think the main reason is that CSF uses BizTalk Server for its primary provisioning scenario. However, there are some key differences based on the functional areas within a SaaS provider that easily distinguish the two. BizTalk Server focuses on the Order-to-Cash functional area while CSF focuses on the Service Network. There are components within the Service Network that BizTalk supports (and thus CSF leverages BizTalk), but over 80 percent of the Service Network requirements need additional functionality.

There are three main scenarios to help determine which product to use first or together:

1.Service Delivery Infrastructure (SaaS): Start with CSF

–CSF provides service providers with tooling, wizards and architecture reference models for their SaaS infrastructures

–CSF provides horizontal assets which can complement the Microsoft SOA Platform to provide dynamic services composition and 3rd party hosted

services.

–BizTalk can be used for service logic (to orchestrate process and rules)

–Foundation for SaaS solutions delivered today

2.Operational and Business Support (OSS/BSS) Systems: Start with BizTalk Server

–Typically application to application interaction and well behaved and well understood interactions.

– Exclusively process driven - usually services/applications interact in the context of a business activity (e.g. order management process or CRM process, etc.)

3.Network / Service Integration: Start with BizTalk Server

–Composite service development and integration – portals, call center apps, etc.

–In most cases requires heavy custom development of workflow and business rules

–Enable interoperability with J2EE, web and legacy Technologies

CSF 3.0 Message Visualizer Tip

2006-11-02T06:24:00Z

Message Visualizer is a graphical utility that a developer or administrator can use to view the participants in a session and monitor the messages flowing between them. It gets extremely difficult to troubleshoot the messages flow in a complex service aggregation environment where multiple services participate in a CSF Session context that too in a production environment. This tool should make that easier. Currently there are some challenges to configure the tool which I have addressed in this article....(read more)

Microsoft Connected Services Framework (MCSF)

Product Positioning - CSF and BizTalk Server

CSF 3.0 Message Visualizer Tip