Breakout (discontinued) vs. Microsoft BizTalk Server

Breakout is well suited for the organizations where there is need of automating multiple recurring process to increase the productivity and effectiveness. For our IT department it has helped us in assigning the support and assistance requests made by different departments to our team members, keep the checklist that they need to follow and easy to use form to collect details and track their status of work.

BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.

Incentivized

• Simple and easy to use interface
• Provides third party integrations
• Good support
• Brings in accountability
• Great for tracking

• It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
• Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
• If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
• Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
• Helps in load balancing.

Incentivized

• Android and iOS still not available

• Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations
• Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code
• Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations

Incentivized

BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.

Incentivized

I gave a 7 because this product BizTalk does need time and training to get familiar with the usability and features, it is not that easy to use.

Incentivized

BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.

Incentivized

Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.

Incentivized

Our organization had evaluated it for sometime, but it was on the higher side for the budget we had. Many of our departments used it for a while, even after the initial demo session many users from different departments had raised IT assistance requests. Keeping in mind these factors at hand we started exploring alternatives.

BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency
• Users haven't needed IT assistance at any point of time
• Made it easy for team leaders to track different tasks more conveniently

• A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.

Incentivized