Software Development: What is Biztalk?

Commonly known as “Biztalk”, the Microsoft Biztalk Server is an enterprise service bus (ESB) that enables companies to automate business processes by means of “adapters” communicating with different software component systems.

So what is an ESB, you might ask? An ESB or enterprise service bus is a software architecture model used for the design and implementation of the interaction and communication between interacting software applications in a Service Oriented Architecture environment.

Biztalk was created by Microsoft Corporation. It has the  following main functions:

•  Enterprise Application Integration 
• Business Process Automation 
• Business-To-Business Communication 
• Message broker
• Business Activity Monitoring

The Biztalk Server, not only act as the Application Integration Server, it is also the Application Server.

What are the uses of Biztalk?  There are common situations where companies want to integrate and manage business processes by exchanging documents but unfortunately, these documents does not have the same format or schema to be able to talk to one another.  Biztalk provides a means to enable and handle these discrepancies and have these automated business processes communicate to one another through the service architecture and the use of adapters. 

Where is development done for the Biztalk Server? Development for BizTalk Server is done through Microsoft Visual Studio. Transformation maps are created by the developer to transform one message to another (for example an XML file can be transformed to SAP IDocs, etc.). Biztalk messages are implemented through the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and defined through XML schemas.