BizTalk Server

BizTalk Server is a product from Microsoft, the software giants. BizTalk server, commonly known as BizTalk, is a Business Project Management server used to automate different business processes. It mainly utilizes the XML and web service capabilities.
BizTalk became known in the early years of this century and is now a popular server which is used by many  businesses to integrate their processes. BizTalk had started with version 2000, but has upgraded to BizTalk Server 2010, thus enhancing its features. BizTalk implementation is done by integrating with Microsoft Visual Studio. By using BizTalk Server, different systems in an organization are integrated in a cost effective and easily manageable way. It can even be used as a message conversion system. Additionally if a business does not need all of its functionalities, it can be used for only selected functionalities.
The different functions offered by BizTalk include Business Process Automation, Business Activity Monitoring, and Message Transferring. BizTalk are:

1. Message
2. Message Box
3. Orchestration
4. Business Rules Engine

Normally in any business, keeping track of business documents is a real headache. The different documents involved in businesses are commonly purchase documents, such as purchase documents and invoices. This document tracking can be managed using BizTalk applications by converting them into the allowed formats like XML and flat files etc. This is known as a message.
Different messages received for processing should be kept somewhere to ensure that no message is missed not properly processed. Here is where Message Box comes into the picture. Message Box can be considered as a database which actually stores the incoming messages.
Normally some processing needs to be done for the documents in case of business organizations so as to get the required output. For this some steps are to be followed and this is done by Orchestration in case of BizTalk. These steps are defined using Business Process Execution Language. As BizTalk works based on Publish-Subscribe method, even if there are number of orchestrations, the corresponding message will go to the corresponding orchestration only.
Business Rules Engine keeps track of the rules. These are kept separate to avoid issues while making changes to the rules.  As we all know rules are always prone to changes in any organization. The messages received using receive ports and receive pipeline are kept in message box, are processed using orchestrations with the help of business rule engine and goes out through send pipeline and send port.
BizTalk Server installation is a process which needs utmost care as it needs number of components. Installation includes IIS, BizTalk Server, SQL Server, Visio etc.