Microsoft BizTalk Server

May 26, 1999

Table of Contents

Microsoft Delivers a New E-Commerce Solution

Microsoft® BizTalk™ Server provides the tools and infrastructure companies require to interchange business documents among various platforms and operating systems regardless of the application being used to process a business document. Companies can easily exchange documents between applications within their own organization. BizTalk Server also provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents via the Internet, which allows companies to interchange documents with external trading partners.

By taking advantage of Microsoft BizTalk-compatible schemas, which are a framework based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) schemas that follow industry standards, BizTalk Server enables organizations to effectively and efficiently conduct business online. This solution does more than help businesses use their existing systems to find customers and partners on the Internet or to sell them goods; it makes establishing long-term trading relationships easy and beneficial to a company’s bottom line. The following business scenarios are some situations in which companies can use BizTalk Server as a platform to build their e-commerce solutions:

• Trading partner integration. Web-based or traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), supply chain integration, order management, invoicing, and shipping coordination.
• Automated procurement. Maintenance Repair and Operations (MRO) pricing and purchasing, order tracking, and government procurement.
• Business-to-business portals. Enterprise portals and extranets, trading communities, electronic catalog management, content syndication, and post-sale customer management.
• Business process integration. Commerce site to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration, commerce site to legacy integration, and ERP to ERP integration.

Whether a company has been engaged in e-commerce for a decade or is just beginning to see the value of this mode of operation, BizTalk Server has the right combination of document interchange and transformation capabilities coupled with enhanced trading partner management tools. Add to this a rich and flexible platform, and scalable, reliable, and secure features, and it becomes clear that BizTalk Server is what companies need today to excel in business-to-business e-commerce.

Current Business-to-Business E-Commerce Challenges

Although many businesses have already established self-service Web sites for their employees, partners, suppliers, and distributors, they still find it difficult to reliably and securely share purchase orders, invoices, and other data over the Internet. By listening to customers, working with solution providers and independent software vendors (ISVs), and participating in industry consortiums, such as RossettaNet and Open Application Group (OAG), Microsoft has identified the following key issues that affect a company’s ability to enter into the electronic commerce arena:

• Data interchange standards require complex implementation and maintenance, and are expensive.
• It is difficult to reconcile diverse data formats.
• There is a lack of integration with existing applications and data sources.
• A single business-oriented tool is not available for managing business processes, exchanging data, and managing multiple systems.
• There is no easy method for securing document interchanges.

These issues cause companies to spend millions of dollars to improve communication between dissimilar systems within their organizations. Once outside their firewalls, these companies face even greater challenges in speaking the language of systems that belong to their suppliers and distributors. The solution for many companies has been to spend valuable time printing information from one system and rekeying that data into another system. These issues, and the technical expertise needed to implement complex communication systems, have resulted in huge costs for those attempting to implement e-commerce in their businesses.

BizTalk Server Solves Document Interchange Issues

Rich and Flexible Platform

BizTalk Server provides the tools and infrastructure that enable business-to-business document interchange. It positions corporations for rapid deployment of the latest technologies in e-commerce. Companies currently conducting traditional e-commerce and EDI will find that BizTalk Server has all the required product components, such as trading partner management, document mapping and translation, reliable document routing and delivery, data extraction and storage for analysis and more, to carry their legacy processes forward. BizTalk Server also extends the feature set of traditional e-commerce and EDI products to include extensive support for XML and Internet transport technologies, such as SMTP, HTTP, FTP, encryption, and certificate exchange.

BizTalk Server makes EDI easier and provides a clean migration for companies to integrate XML into their business processes. In addition to solving platform issues, BizTalk Server also offers companies:

• Document interchange services.
• Support for existing industry data formats.
• Support for existing industry protocols.
• Business-to-business tools and processes.
• Integration with line-of-business (LOB) applications.
• Security by means of digital signature and encryption.
• Support of complex business process definition, automation, and integration.

Details on how BizTalk Server solves each of these issues are outlined in later sections.

Scalable

BizTalk Server is highly scalable and lets companies expand their system as needed to meet load requirements. Companies that are building an e-commerce solution can start with a single BizTalk Server, and then when additional resources are needed can add a second server. Because BizTalk Server features near linear scaling, companies automatically receive increased performance.

Reliability is as important to companies as performance and scalability. BizTalk Server secures delivery of documents by providing a mechanism for reliably sending messages and ensuring that a return receipt is received. For any given transport protocol, users can configure the maximum number of times BizTalk Server attempts to send a document and the maximum amount of time between retries. If a secondary transmission protocol is defined, BizTalk Server automatically switches to it when the primary protocol fails.

Because BizTalk Server uses shared queues for processing and exchanging documents, they are never lost or deleted. When a document is set on the queue, the first available server retrieves and processes it. If a document isn’t successfully sent via the secondary protocol, BizTalk Server places the document into a dead letter queue.

BizTalk Server uses Microsoft Windows 2000 security features, including full support for public-key infrastructure and Windows 2000 Microsoft Transaction Services (MTS). Public-key certificate management includes requesting certificates, processing certificates in a certificate-request response, and exchanging certificates with trading partners. These certificates are available for both digital signature and encryption. MTS offers comprehensive component functionality, such as automatic transaction support for data-integrity protection and simple, but powerful, role-based security.

Document interchange services

Many companies use various platforms and operating systems throughout their organizations and also rely on numerous applications, which often have unique underlying technologies associated with them. Consequently, within an organization document interchange is challenging, and even more so when dealing with external trading partners. BizTalk Server solves this problem by allowing companies to interchange business documents among various platforms and operating systems. It accomplishes this goal regardless of the underlying technology of an application being used to process a business document. BizTalk Server also offers loosely coupled document interchange services to enhance business-to-business e-commerce. BizTalk-compatible schemas provide a common data description that enables data transformation across formats and data portability across business processes. BizTalk Server uses this framework to provide easy-to-use, comprehensive, document interchange services within an organization as well as with diverse trading partners.

BizTalk-compatible schemas extend the capabilities of BizTalk Server by simplifying document interchange for companies that do business on the Internet, and by recognizing application services and data as separate entities. This allows BizTalk Server to focus on data interchange instead of infrastructure compatibility.

BizTalk Server offers data transport independence and supports the transport components listed in Table 1.

* Developers can use DCOM to send and receive data from the server via our standard COM interfaces.

**This service can receive one or more files from the FTP server. Businesses can configure this service to connect to multiple FTP servers, to look in multiple directories on the FTP server, and to look for multiple files by using a file name pattern in the designated directories.

*** Businesses can configure this service to connect to multiple local servers, to look in multiple directories on the local server, and to look for multiple files by using a file name pattern in the designated directories.

Support for existing industry data formats

BizTalk Server supports existing industry data formats, such as XML, EDI (X12 and EDIFACT), flat files (positional and delimited), ADO Recordsets, and more. This, coupled with support for third-party formats and schemas allows BizTalk Server to span a wide range of platforms. Because BizTalk Server supports BizTalk-compatible schemas, it has the ability to advance with industry standards. When new BizTalk-compatible schemas are defined, companies using BizTalk Server will have access to them from a repository on the Web.

BizTalk Server also lets companies maximize the power and flexibility of XML and its associated Document Object Model (DOM). This alone makes exchanging data within an organization, or with trading partners across the world, as simple as using a mouse to drag information from one application to another. By moving EDI to the Internet and adding an extended XML format, companies get batch-type capabilities they’ve had in the past, added flexibility for workflow, and access to information for rapid response.

Support for existing industries protocols

To address common purchasing scenarios of corporations, BizTalk Server will support the use of Open Buying on the Internet (OBI) and other evolving standards. For example, with BizTalk Server and the Internet, corporate purchasing can be transformed from a labor and paperwork intensive process to a self-service application. Companies using purchase order applications can use the capabilities of BizTalk Server and the Internet to transfer orders to suppliers. In response, suppliers can ship the requested goods and then use BizTalk Server to invoice companies. In addition to reducing administrative costs, corporate purchasers can use BizTalk Server to:

• Improve order-tracking accuracy.
• Increase ability to enforce purchasing policies.
• Provide better customer and supplier service.
• Reduce inventories.
• Give companies more power in negotiating exclusive or volume discount contracts.

Business-to-business tools and processes

The BizTalk Server Interchange Manager provides a single source for initiating and managing agreements to exchange documents, creating and managing document specifications and maps, and tracking the transmission and reception of documents for status and business analysis. By combining this functionality with reliable document routing and a complete toolset for server management, BizTalk Server makes e-commerce available to all companies regardless of size or resources.

Trading partner management

Creating and managing relationships with trading partners is essential to building a successful e-commerce solution. BizTalk Server provides loosely coupled integration between trading partners through its profile exchange. To facilitate the exchange of business documents, trading partners expose profile properties, such as:

• Organizations. Certificates, interchange identifiers, contact names, and more.
• Transmit Profiles. Encryption, encoding format (MIME), protocol/application, and Internet address.
• Interchange Definitions. Documents, envelope schema, interchange identifiers, and delimiters.
• Agreements. Process definition of a specific document exchange (scheduled component execution, content-based routing, translation, receipts, and logging).
• Documents. Schema, encryption certificate, and digital signature.

Trading partners, also referred to as organizations, establish agreements among themselves and use these agreements as a means to exchange documents. Sending a document to multiple organizations is nearly as easy as sending that document to a single organization. Users merely establish multiple agreements with their various trading partners and specify that the same document be sent for each agreement.

Translation and mapping tools

When users connect a company’s LOB applications to BizTalk Server, they define business document structures and specify the transformation of the data through the use of an editing tool and a mapping tool: the BizTalk Editor and the BizTalk Mapper. These two tools allow users to create a document specification, which is a description of data that is contained in a given type of structured business document, such as a purchase order or an invoice. By using XML to describe data in a generic way, BizTalk Server is able to output both XML and non-XML business document formats consistently. The BizTalk Mapper lets a user open two document specifications—one as the source schema and one as the target schema—and then establish structural transformations between them. The document specification uses tags to define both XML and non-XML documents in a consistent format. The BizTalk Editor and the BizTalk Mapper support the following structured file formats:

• EDI, including ANSI X12 and UN/EDIFACT.
• Flat or hierarchical files, both delimited and positional (such as SAP IDOCS).
• Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) Recordsets (persisted as XML).
• Well-formed XML.
• XML-Data, Document Type Definitions (DTDs).
• Structured document formats.
• XML-based document templates.

BizTalk Editor

The BizTalk Editor presents a document structure as a set of records and fields. Records can contain other records as well as fields. A BizTalk Editor schema combines records and fields. The BizTalk Editor interprets the data contained in the records and fields in a document specification and creates an XML-Data schema that describes the document.

The overall structure of a document is easy to visualize because the BizTalk Editor delivers a simple tree-control view. To simplify the specification of data types and constraints, the BizTalk Editor also provides a detailed property view that allows users to view and edit all the records and fields contained in a document specification.

Using BizTalk Editor, new document specifications are created either by starting with a blank specification that contains no structure, or by importing existing descriptions (such as DTDs), or instances (such as ASC X12, UN/EDIFACT, or well-formed XML). When a document instance is imported, the BizTalk Editor infers its structure, allows the user to perform any necessary edits, and then creates a BizTalk schema for it. When using a blank specification to create schemas, BizTalk Editor provides a number of templates that may be used as starting points for the creation of common documents, such as purchase orders, invoices, and advance shipping notices.

Microsoft, ISVs, corporations, and standards bodies that use the BizTalk Editor to create document schemas can also use the BizTalk Editor to publish the schemas to standards-based repositories on the Web as well as to corporate-based repositories on an intranet or extranet. The generated schemas are compatible with the Microsoft BizTalk-enabled schemas first announced on March 4, 1999.

At run time, BizTalk Server uses the generated schemas to direct the translation of incoming and outgoing documents to and from an XML representation.

BizTalk Mapper

The BizTalk Mapper is a transformation design tool that maps records and fields between two different document formats by using simple links, functional objects, and programming objects. This tool graphically depicts the changing structural relationship between the data elements of a source document and those of a destination or target document. By establishing this cross reference and data manipulation functionality, a user creates a map, which contains instructions that define the relationship between two different document formats. These maps are generated and stored as XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) files. XSL is one of the XML family of specifications defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

At run time, BizTalk Server uses these XSL maps to drive its transformation engine in mapping actual document content from one structural form to another. These transformations are done between two XML representations, making the mapping process separate and distinct from the translation process into and out of XML.

Reliable document routing and delivery

BizTalk Server queues all incoming documents for reliability, and dequeues and routes documents to the appropriate application on a priority basis. The purpose of the priority scheme is to provide the ability to process documents on a near real-time basis. Priority information, including high, medium, and low, is stored in the header of each document. BizTalk Server also ensures delivery of outbound documents by queuing them for delivery and making sure that a return receipt is received.

Real-time message support enables BizTalk Server to provide synchronous communication, which is the process whereby a document is submitted and then, on the same session or call, a response document is received. The response document can be a return receipt or it can be another type of business document.

To accurately process a document, BizTalk Server parses the header information to determine how to handle the document, based on the document type and priority. If BizTalk Server is not able to handle the document because of malformed or missing information in the header, it is placed in a dead letter queue for manual processing. In many cases, an interchange between two organizations includes only a single document, but in other cases, the interchange can include multiple documents. BizTalk Server is capable of managing multiple documents in a single interchange.

Content-based routing, which involves choosing appropriate agreements and target entities based upon values contained in any data element within a document, is also supported in BizTalk Server. This functionality enables BizTalk Server to move a document to different target entities, such as applications. By exposing all the elements of a document type (XML tag sets), an expression can be created and evaluated at run time to determine the target organization.

Data extraction and storage for analysis

BizTalk Server also lets users track the transmission and reception of documents for troubleshooting and operations analysis. Document Tracking and Activity (DTA) allows companies to track documents that pass through the system, either in batches or singly, as well as to record the processing activity against those documents. DTA captures sender and receiver identifiers, document name and type, user-defined fields, and relevant time parameters. A user can search across documents and interchanges of documents processed by the system. DTA also stores complete copies of the incoming and outgoing document instances for future reference.

By extracting and storing important user-defined data from within documents, businesses can track and analyze more of their operation than by using traditional transaction logs. For example, a purchase order total field can be stored for every purchase order sent to suppliers. This enables reporting and analysis of the monetary volume of purchases going to suppliers over time, or even broken down by each individual supplier.

System configuration and management

Users will find that BizTalk Server provides a complete toolset for creating server groups, adding servers to groups, monitoring queues (input, work, output, and dead letter), and more. BizTalk Server routes inbound documents to the right component for processing and delivery to applications. By using a priority mechanism for handling documents that it has queued, BizTalk Server is able to process documents on a near real-time basis while holding others until processing time is available. BizTalk Server takes advantage of the Microsoft Windows Management Interface and Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in to allow users to easily manage a single BizTalk Server or groups of BizTalk Servers.

Integration with line-of-business applications

Business process integration is a key issue for many companies that need to communicate among their LOB applications. BizTalk Server helps businesses avoid the one-time, per-application "integration fixes" by offering an extensible framework or infrastructure that facilitates application integration. For example, BizTalk Server provides an Application Integration Connector (AIC) that uses DCOM to communicate with the SAP R/3 application. This offers companies the ability to go further than traditional EDI implementations and include deep integration with enterprise applications, such as ERP, Sales Force Automation (SFA), and Advance Planning and Optimization (APO) packages.

Business application software companies such as Baan, PeopleSoft, Navision, Great Plains Software, and others are also committed to integrating their systems to BizTalk Server. These vendors will provide complete packages including AICs, document schemas, and maps. Companies using BizTalk Server will find that when it comes to e-commerce, these third-party components offer greater flexibility and easier application integration.

Security by means of digital signatures and encryption

Most companies that use a value-added network (VAN) for EDI traffic do so, in large part, because of the security those networks offer as a part of their services. Understanding the importance of security—especially when dealing with vital business information—is key to building a solution that guarantees security. There are two primary areas in which BizTalk Server provides security: local security and business-to-business security. Local security provides a means for controlling access to the services and resources of BizTalk Server. Business-to-business security handles authentication of trading partner identities, ensuring privacy of data over the Internet or other public networks.

Local security

BizTalk Server provides security for a company’s assets without added complexity or reduced flexibility. Local security safeguards confidential information, which is critical to building e-commerce solutions that satisfy the needs of an organization and its trading partners.

Business-to-business security

Trading partner authentication is accomplished through the exchange of digital signatures, which are also called certificates. Each trading partner publishes a certificate as part of a trading partner profile. Through the use of encryption, BizTalk Server is able to maintain data or document privacy. Security requirements are configured as part of the envelope schema that’s contained in a trading partner profile.

A signature certificate is used to create digital signatures in order to authenticate information. Signing information does not alter the information, but generates a digital signature string that is either bundled with the information or transmitted separately.

To verify a digital signature, the recipient must have a copy of the public key from the sender's signature certificate. The recipient decrypts the digital signature using the public key to form a digest. A digest is a value that can be used to verify the authenticity of a data stream or business document. The recipient then calculates a message digest independently. The results of the two digests are compared, and if they are identical, the information has not been tampered with and the recipient is able to view the information.

An encryption certificate is also used to secure communications. Encrypting a message ensures the sender that only the intended recipient can access information. To encrypt a business document, the sender must have a copy of the public key from the recipient's encryption certificate. Using this public key, the sender encrypts the business document, then forwards the encrypted document to the recipient. The recipient uses the private key of their encryption certificate to decrypt the business document.

Support of complex business process definition, automation, and integration

With BizTalk Server, Microsoft is laying the groundwork for future support of complex business process definition, automation, and integration. Microsoft is working to implement a BizTalk-compatible message structure that supports reliable delivery, conversations, and long-lived transactions. With these enhancements, companies can propose transactions without having to immediately set up an agreement. Long-lived transactions enable companies to anticipate their needs over time, which in turn lets them better meet their actual requirements.

BizTalk-Compatible Schemas: The Right Foundation for BizTalk Server

Because BizTalk-compatible schemas help to integrate software, companies can instantly increase the efficiency of their business systems and take advantage of e-commerce while they make optimal use of existing hardware and software. The ease and flexibility of these schemas makes it possible to define or enhance a company’s business-to-business processes. The adoption of e-commerce will be greatly accelerated because BizTalk-compatible schemas provide a solid framework for integrating applications and exchanging business documents.

Coupled with comprehensive document interchange and trading partner management tools, BizTalk-compatible schemas enable accurate and rapid exchange of data within organizations and among distributors, suppliers, and customers. BizTalk-compatible schemas extend communication beyond Microsoft products such as BizTalk Server to include third-party products, internal enterprise systems, and Web portals and Web sites from Microsoft and other companies.

Another advantage to using the BizTalk-compatible schemas is that they are designed to address a wide range of business needs, from direct marketing and selling to employee self-service and value chain management. BizTalk-compatible schemas also make it simple to integrate a suite of products and services, including those on the MSN™ network of Internet services.

Speaking the Language of Business in a Consistent Way

The basis for BizTalk Server data interchange is an XML-based vocabulary or schema. XML is a language that allows authors to define custom tags for representing structured data and to specify where particular data elements begin and end within a data stream. Specifically, BizTalk-compatible schemas:

• Provide tags for denoting standard commercial data in a purchase order. For example, item, price, and units ordered.
• Define industry-specific tags. For example, billing systems for healthcare organizations will need to define tags for denoting data in their forms, such as patient, treatment, and insurer data.
• Enables communication among various object models, programming languages, and database schemas.

BizTalk-compatible schemas define data and set guidelines for how data is exchanged. The framework uses descriptions or schemas that come from existing industry standards. Examples of such existing standards are as follows:

• Product purchasing information for corporations
• Traditional data forms such as EDI
• Emerging descriptions for product catalogs
• Special offers
• Promotional campaigns

In addition to describing the data, BizTalk-compatible schemas also describes how to handle the data. By providing easy data interchange and by easing business process integration, BizTalk-compatible schemas deliver a common ground for sharing information and engaging in e-commerce.

BizTalk-Compatible Schemas Offer Greater Process Integration

Companies use EDI today for automating transactions—purchase orders, invoices, advanced ship notices and so on—with trading partners. EDI, however, is expensive and relatively complex, which limits its use to larger businesses and their partners. E-commerce and BizTalk-compatible schemas can extend this automation to all trading partners. Businesses can add these schemas to their existing EDI base and begin to share design information, respond to sales spikes or stock outages more quickly, and extend trading relationships with partners of all sizes.

BizTalk-Compatible Schema Initiatives for E-Commerce and Application Integration

The purpose of BizTalk-compatible schemas is to integrate applications within a business and to enhance relationships between both direct and indirect trading partners. An additional goal is to enable richer content availability at online marketplaces, such as MSN. To ensure that BizTalk-compatible schemas will deliver extended value to organizations, Microsoft is working collaboratively with customers, industry partners, and industry consortia to define the schemas. These schemas will drive the creation and adoption of guidelines for how business is conducted over the Internet by using and extending the work that’s been done by existing industry standards bodies. By leveraging existing standards, the XML-based framework of BizTalk-compatible schemas offers the conversion tools needed to easily modify the structure of business documents.

BizTalk-compatible schemas for document handling will be based on industry standards such as EDI, will borrow from object-based industry initiatives such as the OAG in manufacturing, and will be defined with additional input from ISVs, customers, and industry consortia. As new XML standards emerge, contributors to the BizTalk-compatible schemas will evaluate and support standards that deliver value to customers.

Industry Initiatives

Microsoft, ISV partners, and industry-standards bodies are extending the Windows Distributed interNet Applications (Windows DNA) architecture by using BizTalk-compatible schemas to ensure application integration within and between organizations and across industries. In addition, Microsoft is creating these schemas for each of its existing industry initiatives, including ActiveX for Healthcare, Microsoft ActiveStore™ retail technology architecture for retail in-store systems, Windows DNA for Financial Services, Windows DNA for Manufacturing, and supply-chain management.

Products and Promotions

BizTalk-compatible schemas will become the product, service, and promotions content framework for supporting the evolution of MSN as an open marketplace. It will include rich support for document formats that make it easy for manufacturers and merchants to increase their market presence by promoting business, product, and promotional information directly to MSN and other consumer sites on the Web.

Microsoft Product Line

Microsoft BizTalk Server is new technology that will make it easier for companies to take advantage of BizTalk-compatible schemas. By using these schemas and the underlying XML technology, BizTalk Server will enable data exchange and application integration over the Internet. It extends the features of the Microsoft Commerce Interchange Pipeline with scalable and reliable document interchange and transformation capabilities as well as enhanced trading partner management tools.

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

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