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.
Salesforce Partner Management is a great tool for scenarios where a partner portal needs to be created in a quick and cost-efficient manner by teams that do not necessarily have a broad technical knowledge and when the time to market is key. In the situations where the use case is more advanced and cannot be covered by the out-of-the-box functionalities of SPM, then the tool is less effective.
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.
One thing is, you have to put the time you took on the case if you edited it. I would like to change the name or a note and not have to go back and put how long it took.
We are definitely going to renew as we created and developed a very functional and complete solution that we won't want to lose. and the reason we achieved that is by continuously evolving and enhancing. That would not be possible without the qualified technical support we have at our disposal internally.
Salesforce Partner Management is complete and has great usability. Just as a Salesforce full CRM does. However, when you have to deploy the initial implementation and/or create the infrastructure for your Salesforce Partner Management it might require, as expected, a very good support and development team and resources
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.
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.
Tune provides great on-boarding experience for new users, but the functionality of the product itself is limited. For example if you multiple partners worldwide who sell your product, Salesforce CRM integration is a must to achieve business goals. Salesforce ecosystems helps to avoid having multiple tools and licenses. One big differentiator is that Salesforce Partner Managements allows for personalization that is user-friendly, while with Tune user is expected to do some coding
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.
