Microsoft BizTalk

Send and receive HL7 messages.

Logging of errors.

Ability to integrate with other systems.

Better help guide.

Better method to alert admins of issues maybe an email alert.

Performance could be faster.

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.

It still could add more cloud features.

Need performance improvements.

It is expensive. Cost should be reduced.

Very few BizTalk experts. Usage is very low.

Simplifying the mappers and pipeline configurations.

Microsoft BizTalk is extremely powerful

Microsoft BizTalk can connect to a number of different enterprise applications

Microsoft BizTalk utilities a GUI environment for development

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

Pick up after faults quickly

Detailed messaging

Detailed Reporting

Hard to implement

Reporting can be tough to dig in to

Required 3rd party app for support

The frequently used capabilities are very strong. It's quite simple to create basic tasks or connections to other systems.

I would like to see a better error messaging system.

BizTalk is great at mapping input files to output file (or input schemas to output schemas). It uses a pretty well designed mapping screen, and you drag arrows from one input field to the output field. You can also put all sorts of conditionals on the input to output fields mappings. That lets you change the output value based on more one input value, or if the input value has a certain value, or the absence of a value, you can set the output value to something else.

BizTalk is good at connecting to SAP, and allows you to download SAP Idoc schemas to use in Orchestrations which allow you to send and receive SAP Idocs.

BizTalk is pretty good at notifying you with email. In particular, you can have your Orchestrations send email based on a status. You can send email at the beginning, middle and end if you so desire. That is particularly useful developing and debugging orchestrations.

BizTalk needs to be better at tracking down errors after the fact. Input files by default get deleted after processing successfully, unless you specifically specify that they don't. This can be an issue where you need to see what the input file contained, since you may have errors showing up in your target platform, in our case this was SAP.

BizTalk logging needs improved. It needs to be able to log the content of the messages it sends and receives. It would be good if the log had a link to the input and output files.

BizTalk needs to allow a simple way to preserve the input and output files for debugging purposes. A master setting on the orchestration would be helpful for this.

BizTalk uses Microsoft Visual Studio as the IDE (integrated development environment) tool, and it's very easy to use.

The orchestration engine of BizTalk addresses resource issue very well for long-running business processes by dehydrating and rehydrating orchestration instances.

BizTalk is very easy to integrate if the development is mainly on the Microsoft software family.

BizTalk mainly used in a publish-subscribe pattern, it has toolkits from ESB (Enterprise Services Bus), but it's not as good as other native ESB systems.

BizTalk didn't provide many native adapters and it needs to be made by a developer or bought from a third party, like Amazon S3 adapter or SMS adapter.

BizTalk only supports JSON in the latest version 2013 R2, and it needs to transform JSON to XML for internal mail box use and then transform from XML back to JSON.