No
application is an island. Whether we like it or not, tying systems together has become the norm. Yet connecting software
is about more than just exchanging bytes. As organizations move toward a service-oriented world, the real goal—creating effective business processes that unite separate systems into a coherent whole—comes within reach. BizTalk Server 2006 supports this goal. Like its predecessors, this latest release allows
connecting diverse software, then graphically creating and modifying process logic that uses that software. The product also lets information workers monitor running processes, interact with trading partners, and perform other business-oriented tasks. Built on the foundation of its predecessor, BizTalk Server 2004, this new release will look familiar to anyone who’s used this earlier version. The most important new additions in BizTalk Server 2006 are: Better support for deploying, monitoring, and managing applications. Significantly simpler installation. Improved capabilities for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). BizTalk Server 2006 also uses the latest releases of other Microsoft technologies. It’s built on version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, for example, and its developer tools are hosted in Visual Studio 2005. For storage, the product can use SQL Server 2005, the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship database product, or SQL Server 2000, the previous release. BizTalk Server 2006 can also run on 64-bit Windows, taking advantage of the larger memory and other benefits this new generation of hardware offers1.