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Visio Plays Big Role in BizTalk
[Note: this week's issue is shorter than usual, due
to Windows 98 "issues." - Ed.]
With all BizTalk Server's parts still not in beta release, Microsoft trails other vendors that have gained a significant understanding of business process modeling in live customer settings. Microsoft has significantly improved the features of its unshipped integration broker, but the biggest challenge is getting BizTalk to market in 2000. Microsoft's offering will use Visio for process modeling, and a Microsoft-developed XML specification (based on pi calculus, a next-generation process model) that defines the flow between systems and applications. Competitors to Microsoft's BizTalk include BEA Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Level 8 Systems, Oracle, Software Technologies, Tibco Software and Vitria Technology. - Gartner Group
A key feature of BizTalk is so-called "Orchestration" technology, one of the fruits of Microsoft's US$1.3 billion purchase of Visio Corp. last year. Orchestration will help the different computers involved in a business transaction talk to each other, making it easier to pass data from a server computer to a desktop PC to a handheld device. - Reuters
Orchestration is Microsoft's technology for easily defining
the business process logic that dictates how an e-commerce Web
site functions and the information that needs to be passed among
mainframe, Unix, personal digital assistants and Windows-based
computers to complete a transaction.
The orchestration technology makes use of flowcharting software
Microsoft obtained when it acquired Visio. Microsoft's
orchestration technology does not actually generate code. Instead,
it generates a definition of an application, written in XML, consisting
of many separate programs, both within and outside a company,
linked together. Microsoft had originally planned to debut BizTalk
Server last year but decided to delay the product's introduction
to add the orchestration technology, according to sources. - CNET
The BizTalk Orchestration software includes visual design tools, an engine for orchestrating processes, and an open binding architecture for integrating with any application. A drag-and-drop design environment based on the popular Visio graphics tool helps business analysts and developers graphically define and modify interactions between applications and organizations at the business-process level -- rather than through low-level software interfaces. Processes can be graphically connected with specific components and applications to build solutions. - Microsoft press release
Jeremy Burton, vp for Internet platform marketing at Oracle, derides the lateness and the lack of rich features in Microsoft's BizTalk tool, particularly its use of the newly acquired Visio drawing software to produce business-process diagrams. "Visio is a toy, not a real modeling tool," Burton declares. The long-delayed BizTalk Server product is now promised to ship by the end of the year. - TheStandard.com