BizTalk Server Reviews

Software development, right from start, was custom and tailor-made. The most changing parts of these software products are the interfaces to the internal and external worlds; interfaces to other third-party software products, databases, file types, technologies, application software external to the system being integrated with.

Integration concepts must have evolved from device drivers. Earlier computer systems and their software environments were privately owned by vendors like IBM, HPE, Dell, Digital, etc.These vendors used to, and now also, custom develop hardware products and computer operating systems. The applications development in those days was called proprietary development. The only common thing was the programming interface exposed to developers and computer operators called computer languages like COBOL, C, Pascal, FORTRAN, etc.

The computer systems evolved from large-sized minimal processing machines to, nowadays, compact laptops, cell phones, IoT devices and supercomputers. These computer systems had main systems and external devices called peripheral devices. These devices later became interoperable amongst the hardware and software vendors and were being produced by third-party vendors. This introduced the concept of a device driver to be able to plug and play the devices. These device drivers separate from the internal intricacies of the devices from the main machine's operating control, and handle tasks on their own.

The same concept is being used in software integration tools like MS BizTalk. Here, intricacies of the software systems - their internal operations, methodology developed by different different developers - used to be called spaghetti code. These complications of internal systems were to be isolated from the system being integrated to and were separated by integration software.

The integration software like MS BizTalk has adapters (as I mentioned earlier) for various external systems. These adapters are ready-made (encapsulated) functionality for a specific technology (File, FTP, MSMQ, web services, EDI), databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.), application platforms (SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, healthcare adapters for HIPPA, HL7, etc.), or for integration with a system under development being integrated to these external systems.

What integration software achieves is, it isolates business logic (if-then-else, business rules, loops, exception handling, etc.) required to control the data, concurrently (multi-threaded), and does validation of data, special handling, and routing. In achieving this functionality, it isolates the external interfaces' handling logic in the adapters, main control of process flow in workflows (called BizTalk Integrations), and ports (ports are the locations where process control and data is to be delivered).

There are receive-only, send-only, and send-receive ports. These MS BizTalk Integrations can be subscribed by connecting the dots between systems, by connecting to ports, just like an electrician connects wires, a plumber connects connectors, a construction worker connects bridges to the roads, tunnels are connecting two end of mountains, or a railway worker joins the tracks for railroad.

I worked on an application integration project with MS BizTalk 2002 with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections at Camp Hill , Pennsylvania, USA, using File and FTP adapters.

I worked with Cargus Systems at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on BizTalk Integrations using Oracle 9i adapter and Grate Plains adapter (for MS Dynamics financial package).

I also worked on MS BizTalk 2004 with Med-immune Pharmaceuticals at Gaithersburg, Maryland, on their Sales Order Management System of Flu-mist Vaccines. The sales orders are entered in Siebel CRM where integrations receive that data using a Siebel adapter, transforms it and sends to various recipients like a SAP-based ERP system, for sales MRP-related operations and other manufacturing of vaccine-related operations, MS SQL database for further processing of sales order data, accounting and reporting. These MS BizTalk Integrations are also used with mainframe systems to pull archived data and generate required reporting.

I also worked as Lead Architect on a BizTalk 2009 integration project for Maharashtra State Electricity Boards web bill pay project (electronic electricity bill payment system.). This MVC-based web system integrated with MS SharePoint 2009, MS CRM Dynamics 2009.

Development is simple. I wish overall implementation and debugging were made simpler.

I have used it for three years.

Documentation and internet support is great.

Setup is straightforward and complex, depending on the configuration being used. More advanced level needs expert support.

An in-house team implemented it most of the time.

ROI is excellent.

Pricing and licensing is reasonable.

MS BizTalk is reliable and dependable.

Integration software has made application integration a building block and simpler.

The platform is more like a Lego landscape of different building blocks and the most valuable part is that they can be built and constructed independently. You have many degrees of freedom and all types of different applications for your business needs. In Luxembourg, I've been connecting bank interfaces, document management systems, and management systems for a two-month contract. Credit card interfaces and high deposits, etc. It was a very complicated workflow. The solution offers many degrees of freedom in order to connect different systems with complicated workflows and very complicated mappings.

There is a follow-up version called Logic App which right now runs only in the Microsoft hosted Azure Cloud. We're just using JSON instead of XML which is very simple to administer and configure because it's a platform that's a server. You do not have to install anything. You just say I need some resources and Azure will do the rest for you. It's very easy to use. In Germany, however, there are very few customers using it because no one trusts putting data onto the Cloud. It's hosted by Microsoft, it's not hosted by a private cloud. That's a specific German problem, I know that the French are less restrictive, but in Germany, that's a big problem.

For future releases, I'm guessing Microsoft is trying to build out Logic App, but having another server with the tool which actually rewires the workflow and optimizes the workflow using a simplification operator would be a huge step ahead of all other opposing products, like Oracle, or Talend.

If you know what you are doing, it can be running years without having to be rebooted. It's a stable product. I have less experience with the relatively new Logic Apps, but because it's being handled as a platform in the Cloud, and it might be less stable, I'm guessing some customers might be having problems. However, in Luxembourg, we have systems which are being booted something like once a year, and it's not a problem.

Essentially, you can do whatever you like with these systems, and you do not have to worry about the scaling because if one server is overloaded, it just forwards the message to the next server, even if it were designated to a specific server. It weeds out the messages according to the load. If you want to scale it, you just add new servers. I would say it's easily scalable.

Technical support depends on your service level agreement. If you have a top agreement you will be called back in four hours. If you have a less expensive one, maybe eight hours or 24 hours, depending on your pricing. They do report back and there are competent engineers on the other line. In my experience, the quality is comparable to Oracle. I've been satisfied.

It's a complex product because you have many degrees of freedom to connect different parts together. Whether it's sensible or not, is up to you, but the machine does allow it. Because of the vast degrees of freedom, it's complex.

From a stability standpoint, I would rate the solution 9.5 out of 10. From a manageability standpoint, it's more like a 7 out of 10. Overall, I would rate it at 8.5 out of 10.

First of all, it’s the concept of orchestrations which extends the tool from simply being responsible for “fire-and-forget” messaging pattern to a more powerful one allowing you to implement some sophisticated business processes. It may even use long running transactions. Apart from that, as a useful feature there can be pointed out, is a concept of various adapters. These adapters operate independently from orchestrations and mappings between initially created source and target schemas and it prevents from extra effort when modifications in data structure are required.

The product stood out as a really helpful solution when we came upon a problem of increasing the number of relationships between corporate systems, naturally causing an increase in expenses required to maintain the existing infrastructure. This is extremely important if any new system is introduced to corporate infrastructure. It only requires a BizTalk connection instead of solving connectivity problems with a bunch of other systems.

Regarding some areas which can be potentially revised or improved, it should be said about debugging process, especially for class libraries, as it is not so user-friendly or easy to set-up. Also, the default receive and send pipelines perform well, but it would be great if these pipelines can treat XML by default irrespective of namespaces. In this case, no additional settings (like “Qualified”) should be required in order to prevent data losses when transmitting the data from source scheme to target scheme within BizTalk. But, these items are not so critical when compared with some performance issues which can take place within projects of really significant functional volume. In such cases even the possibility to perform load balancing by introducing additional host instances and assigning applications to it may not appear to be a relief.

The feature of mapper design and orchestration with Visual Studio is valuable for us.

This solution has enabled our IT department to connect all our systems together without the need to modify these systems.

Features which could be improved include sending JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and receiver ports (which was added later).

We have been using the solution for over a year.

The deployment package is very easy, but if you have isolated host services like WCF or Web Services on IIS, then you will need to perform some additional manual deployment.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I didn't use the customer service at all.

I didn't use the technical support at all.

Previously we used IBM MQ. IBM MQ consultants are not easy to find, especially in our geographical area (Middle East/North Africa).

BizTalk is easy to implement, deploy, install, and configure.

The setup is very straightforward.

We implemented through a vendor team, and they are good. I transferred my experience to the vendor.

I can't comment on the ROI.

The pricing and licensing structure is excellent.

We evaluated Microsoft TFS.

Read up well on how to implement before you get started.

• Orchestration debugger
• Mapper tool
• Flat file schema designer
• Various adapters
• Ability to define XSLT transformation

• Faster development time
• Easy to customize
• Improved monitoring and tracking of processes

• Support for JSON data
• Cross-platform support
• Not being tied down to SQL Server database

I have used it for eight years.

We encounter issues with deployment when SQL Server and BizTalk Server are on separate machines, especially with the MSDTC.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.