Announcing the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack – Office Developer Program
The BizTalk Adapter Pack (BAP) was announced about a month ago during the Office Developer Conference and became available a couple of weeks ago. The BAP provides a robust and comprehensive out-of-the-box connectivity infrastructure to three major line-of-business (LOB) systems - SAP, Siebel, and Oracle Databases. The technology is based on the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) LOB Adapter SDK and inherently relies on the core WCF concepts, principles, and classes implemented in the .NET Framework 3.5.
What’s in the BizTalk Adapter Pack?
- SAP Adapter
- ADO.NET Data Provider for SAP
- Siebel Adapter
- ADO.NET Data Provider for Siebel
- Oracle Database Adapter
The WCF LOB Adapter SDK that the BizTalk Adapter Pack is built on also includes the development tools required to create connectivity solutions that use this technology. Some of these tools are:
- An LOB Web Service project template for Visual Studio, which is used for creating IIS-based Web Services hosting the BizTalk Adapter Pack
- Add Adapter Service Reference Wizard, which is used for mining LOB metadata and adding Web Service-like proxies to a .NET application
- WCF Adapter Development Wizard, which is used to help start custom adapter development projects
Along with the BAP, we also launched the BizTalk Adapter Pack – Office Developer Program, designed to validate the use of the BizTalk Adapter Pack as a connectivity solution in direct integration scenarios with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and the Office Business Applications such as Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft Office Word. The scope of the program is validation of six key scenarios, as depicted in the following diagram.
Scenarios Overview
The following list provides a brief description of each direct integration scenario:
- Scenario 1: A custom-developed web part in MOSS communicates with an IIS-hosted adapter to interact with LOB data
- Scenario 2: A custom-developed web part hosts the adapter in-process
- Scenario 3: Configuring the Business Data Catalog (BDC) in MOSS to communicate with an IIS-hosted adapter to interact with LOB data
- Scenario 4: Custom-developed web part or the BDC using the ADO.NET provider capabilities of the BizTalk Adapter Pack to communicate with the LOB
- Scenario 5: An Office Business Application communicating with an IIS-hosted adapter to interact with LOB data
- Scenario 6: A SSIS package in SQL, configured to communicate with an IIS-hosted adapter to interact with LOB data
Technologies
- BizTalk Adapter Pack
- Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
- Microsoft Office
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
Customer Participation
The BAP - Office Developer Program is now open for new customer nominations. Joining this program will provide you with access to conference calls with members of the BAP development team, access to private discussion forums, and the ability to discuss and report bugs and issues directly back to the team at Microsoft.
If you would like to work closely with the product team and implement and test any of the six scenarios in your solution, please fill out the short survey and be specific in answering the questions to help us accurately evaluate your application. We will contact you shortly thereafter. If you have any questions, you can contact us via e-mail by clicking here.
The BizTalk SOA Customer Programs Team
