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Simple walkthrough for BizTalk
March 10, 2016

Simple walkthrough for BizTalk

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft BizTalk Server

Microsoft BizTalk is used in my organization as an integration tool across the whole organization to connect different LOB (line of business) applications, like CRM (customer relationship management) application, billing application, campaign management application and transaction management application.

The main purpose of using the tool here is to play the message broker role and let different systems exchange data in a real time manner.

  • 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.
  • If the Microsoft SQL Server database is used as well as other Microsoft applications, then BizTalk will be a good tool to add.
  • Many .NET developers are available in the market if there is a requirement to use it to develop a BizTalk Server rapidly.
  • If the organization is focused on open source tools or Java family, BizTalk may be not a good choice.
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.

Microsoft BizTalk is good to use as a message broker tool to process long run business process across multiple applications, but may not be very good when the requirement is for a heavy real-time message queue or topic process or to distribute across multiple applications.

BizTalk is easy to integrate with .net family applications, but it may take more time for it to be integrated with other family applications like Java.