BizTalk: Implementing Business-to-Business E-Commerce
Authors: James G. Kobielus
Venue:  (2000)

From the Book:PREFACE: PrefaceWhat Makes an Electronic Marketplace Tick?We live in the most dynamic, productive, and innovative society the world has ever known.Today's economy pulses with electronic vibrancy. We have created an engine of nonstop wealth generation, drawing power from the flow of cheap, easy, instantaneous transactions on the World Wide Web. In the few short years since we first commercialized the Web, this new mass medium has become a familiar presence in offices and households worldwide. Millions of us are venturing out onto the Web to browse for goods and services. The thought of transmitting our credit card numbers to a merchant's distant server no longer seems so scary. Buying online has become so commonplace that we hardly think twice anymore. E-commerce is simply how we shop and work in this new millennium.Electronic marketplaces are the backbone of our new economy. We are all familiar with business-to-consumer (B2C) e-marketplaces, in the form of mass-market portals, online retailers, auction sites, and the like. Just as important are business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces, which build upon companies' long experience with electronic data interchange (EDI) and provide various Internet-based commerce services tailored to the needs of particular industries. Trading partners may establish B2B connections through online intermediaries, often called commerce "hubs" or "exchanges," or through secure "extranets" implemented between their respective internal networks. However implemented, these are environments where dozens, thousands, or millions of buyers and sellers can meet to transact business.E-marketplaces rely, ofcourse,on networks, software, and the technical wizardry that keeps it all operating around the clock, day in and day out, across all trading partners. But what makes B2B e-marketplaces really tick, down deep, are agreements on the ground rules for transactions among trading partners. This is where B2B trading environments build on traditional EDI, with its emphasis on secure, guaranteed, electronic delivery of standardized business documents. This is also where Microsoft's BizTalk initiative fits into the world of B2B e-commerce.The beauty of BizTalk is in the simplicity of the concept and the richness of its potential B2B applications. At its core, BizTalk defines a standard electronic message "envelope" for routing e-commerce transactions between companies. You can transmit this BizTalk message over standard e-mail systems, over the Web, and over other underlying network "protocols." You can process this BizTalk message over any operating environment, using programs developed in any computer language, without the need for sending and receiving applications to be online at the same time or otherwise in direct communication.BizTalk is several things. It is a Microsoft-championed strategic e-commerce initiative. It is a Microsoft-dominated e-commerce industry consortium, repository, and clearinghouse. It is a set of Microsoft-developed e-commerce interoperability specifications. It is a set of Microsoft and third-party products and services that implement these interoperability specifications. And it is a core infrastructure for the Microsoft .NET initiative.Fundamentally, BizTalk supports development of ever more sophisticated "marketectures" for industry segments and the economy as a whole. You can build new e-commerce services by developing new business rules to manage the routing and processing of BizTalk messages and their precious cargo: structured business documents. Change the business rules for handling BizTalk messages and you change the ground rules of the e-marketplace. Change the business rules on your extranet and you reengineer the supply chain.The details of Microsoft's multifaceted BizTalk initiative are the substance of this book. Microsoft has defined an ambitious roadmap for its own products and services that implement the BizTalk "framework." However, BizTalk is not just limited to Microsoft's offerings. Indeed, BizTalk will have failed as an industry initiative if Microsoft doesn't enlist a broad range of other software vendors and service providers to implement its technical framework.BizTalk: Implementing Business-to-Business E-Commerce is a business book that will help you think through a host of management and technical issues before investing precious corporate resources on BizTalk-enabled products and services. We have developed this book primarily to serve two groups of professionals: Nontechnical management: business professionals who have a basic understanding of computer and telecommunications concepts and are responsible for B2B e-commerce projects Technical management: information systems and telecommunications professionals who have a basic understanding of management issues and are responsible for B2B e-commerce infrastructure planning, deployment, and operations within their organizationsWe provide a detailed technical discussion of Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2000 product and how it integrates with Windows 2000, Commerce Server 2000, SQL Server 2000, Host Integration Server 2000, Visual Studio, and other Microsoft products, services, and technologies. We show you how BizTalk Server 2000 might figure into the architectures of hubbed e-marketplaces, extranets, and intranets. And we discuss how BizTalk figures into Microsoft's business plans and into those of some of Microsoft's strategic partners.We have organized the book into four principal parts, each of which consists of several chapters.Part One discusses BizTalk fundamentals. What is BizTalk? What value does BizTalk contribute to e-commerce? Who developed, manages, and oversees the BizTalk initiative's many facets? How does BizTalk differ from other e-commerce initiatives? Which vendors are implementing and supporting BizTalk? What are the basic standards and technologies behind BizTalk? How mature are BizTalk-compliant products and services? How open is the BizTalk Framework?Part Two provides a comprehensive overview of BizTalk applications in B2B e-commerce. Most of the discussion addresses potential applications, since Microsoft had not yet released the commercial BizTalk Server 2000 product at the time this book was written. We describe three integration scenarios into which enterprises and service providers will deploy BizTalk Server 2000: Hubbed marketplace integration: integrating your internal business processes indirectly, via external trading hubs and exchanges, with trading partners (TPs) Extranet supply-chain integration: integrating your internal business processes directly, via extranets, with trading partners Enterprise application integration: integrating your internal "back-end" business applications with your e-commerce sitePart Three discusses commercial BizTalk-enabled products and services that have been announced for availability in 2000. We examine on Microsoft's two-pronged strategy for rolling out BizTalk-enabled offerings: as server-based software products and as portal-based e-commerce services. We provide an in-depth discussion of Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2000 product and its integration with Windows 2000, Windows DNA 2000 application servers, and other Microsoft products and services.Part Four discusses the various technologies, standards, and products that support a full deployment of BizTalk Server 2000 in a corporate or service provider network. In particular, we discuss the following BizTalk-related topics: Operating environment: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft Windows 2000? Markup technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 parse, produce, and process messages and documents encoded in the industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML)? Document mapping and transformation technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 use the industry-standard Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) specification to map and transform XML-encoded messages and documents? Schema definition technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 make use of the industry standard XML Namespaces and XML Schemas specifications, and Microsoft's own XML Data Reduced specification, in validating XML-encoded messages and documents? Database technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft SQL Server? Directory technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Windows 2000's Active Directory and with third-party directories via the industry standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Security technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Windows 2000's public key infrastructure (PKI) features? Object technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), Distributed COM (DCOM), and COM+ object technologies and work with the Microsoft-developed Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)? Message-brokering technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ) and other message-brokering technologies, including IBM's MQSeries? Transaction technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). Application development technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools? System management technologies: How does BizTalk Server 2000 integrate with Microsoft Management Console?We also provide a comprehensive glossary of technical terms that appear in the book. You will find this book an invaluable resource in high-visibility e-commerce integration projects over the coming years. BizTalk-compliant products and services will become widespread in B2B projects in the near future, riding on the coattails of the popular Windows 2000 operating environment.The bottom line is that if your boss doesn't ask you to get up to speed on BizTalk, before long your trading partners almost certainly will.