How all artifacts work together

The BizTalk Server is a product developed by Microsoft as a response to the increasing variety   of disparate systems and the need to exchange messages between them.

The need for this kind of tool is easy to understand as computer-based Information Systems have their own data structures, document structures, and workflows, and exchanging documents between companies or just separate systems demands an alignment between the business processes. We need to integrate these so that when a message arrives, it is fully integrated with the workflow it is meant to trigger.

This kind of alignment requires middleware tools that can capture the messages that need to be exchanged, apply all transformations and business rules required by the target, and make sure that the message is integrated in the correct business process in its systems. BizTalk Server fits in this middleware platform and its main role is to respond to this need of business process integration.

While working with systems integration there are several challenges that need to be fulfilled and understood, including the format and structure of the documents. When the middleware platform captures a message, it doesn’t know its structure, which nodes it contains, or the destination system. But there are plenty more potential problems, such as if the document structure meets the destination’s expected structure and the workflow it needs to follow.

All of these problems and many more are resolved by developing BizTalk Server applications with the use of several objects that you can develop and combine. In this book we will take a tour of each set of artifacts, which are:

• Schemas
• Ports
• Pipelines
• Maps
• Orchestrations

In addition to the BizTalk Server applications artifacts, there are several more artifacts, such as adapters, that are basically software components that enable you to easily send messages out of or receive messages into BizTalk Server with a delivery mechanism that conforms to a commonly recognized standard. They will be explained in more detail throughout the book. The following figure gives an overview of how all these artifacts work together within a BizTalk Server application:

Simple Applications