Likelihood to Recommend Best suited for fast development with a fundamental emphasis on object orientation Prohibitive costs for very small integration projects Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Easy to use: The simplicity of its programming language allows fast learning. Visual environment to generate complex code. Robust: A fall of the system will not be a problem. Never again will information of the transactions in progress be lost. Never more messages lost. Connect to the world: The most popular connection is possible to implement quickly. FTP, File folder, TCP, SMPT, REST.... all method are ready to use. Only define "where" and "how" Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Given that Ensemble and Cache are one of if not the only true fully object orientated database/development technologies for massive transactional data systems its customizability is extensive and it just comes down to the creativity of the developer to get the products to pretty much do whatever they want to do with it. However, this is not necessarily obvious to newcomers to the technology. The developer community could do with greater participation from the software developers/application specialists and engineers within InterSystems. More extensive documentation and greater access to proven working solutions particularly in the realm of some of the lesser known or new and upcoming technologies. Read full review 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 Read full review Likelihood to Renew BizTalk will always be required at this hospital.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Usability 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.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Support Rating I have yet to raise an issue with InterSystems WRC that they have been unable to resolve to my satisfaction in the 20+ years that I have worked with their products.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure you have everybody and all depts. On board during testing on test server.
Greg Walia Technical and Application Support Specialist
Read full review Alternatives Considered Mirth is another integration platform that we have used but its development, in Java, made us always create new methods every time a new product was integrated. Every connection process had to be developed from the beginning and it was not easy to reuse code. Nor did it allow us to have an extensive catalog of HL7 messaging, having to perform the validation of each and every one of its fields manually.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We have integrated 5 laboratories in a treatment monitoring system in less than a month of development. Being able to integrate the following in a period no longer than a week. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots InterSystems Ensemble Screenshots