Microsoft Announces Much-Improved BizTalk Server 2002

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Microsoft last week announced the general availability of its BizTalk Server 2002, the kicker to its existing BizTalk Server 2000 XML-based middleware program. The improved BizTalk Server 2002 middleware is better integrated with other Microsoft system programs, and comes out just as Microsoft is seeing some momentum build behind BizTalk Server 2000. Microsoft says that with the help of its systems integration partners, the company was able to sell BizTalk Server to 800 customers in its first year of sales in 2001.

BizTalk Server 2002, claims Microsoft, has improved integration with the company's Visual Studio .NET integrated development environment. The exact nature of this improved integration is still somewhat of a mystery, however. BizTalk Server 2002 supports the SOAP network protocol that Microsoft has invented and which is now an open standard at its 1.1 release level. The new middleware also supports XML 1.0, another evolving standard, as well as support for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to transform documents between different formats. XML covers the grammar and layout of documents set up for data interchange, and SOAP is the protocol that rides on top of the TCP/IP network protocol that allows XML documents to be a medium through which applications can communicate with each other.

BizTalk Server 2002 also supports the United Nations Electronic Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (UN/EDIFACT) and the ANSI X12 EDI standard document specification. A host of derivative XML document interchange formats have evolved in the past few years, and many of these are now supported. The new version of BizTalk also includes something called SEED (an acronym that has not been explained), which allows companies to publish XML document configuration information to their partners so their applications (presumably using BizTalk Server as middleware glue) and be quickly linked. BizTalk Server 2002 integrates with Microsoft Operations Manager, the management program for Windows servers, and with Application Center 2000, the application development workflow manager for Windows servers.

Microsoft says that for production environments, BizTalk Server 2002 requires a server with either Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server; both have to be updated with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later. Companies who are only interested in supporting the development tools associated with BizTalk Server 2002 can install them on these two Windows server flavors or they can deploy the tools on Windows 2000 Professional with SP2 or later or the new Windows XP Professional edition. Microsoft's specs say that BizTalk Server 2002 requires at least 256 MB of main memory and 6 GB of disk space to operate (that's twice the main memory of BizTalk Server 2000 and probably half as much as the 512 MB that customers really will need to see decent performance.) Microsoft says that a Pentium processor running at 300 MHz or faster is enough to do the job. Customers who do not run clustered implementations of SQL Server 7.0 or SQL Server 2000 are warned that they must install these databases on their servers prior to installing BizTalk Server 2002. Similarly, BizTalk Server 2002 has to be installed prior to clustered implementations using SQL Server 2000. If you want to play around with a trial version of BizTalk Server 2002, you can download the program at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/trial/default.asp

Microsoft seems to be charging the same price for BizTalk Server 2002 as it did for the prior BizTalk Server 2000. The Enterprise Edition, which is what Microsoft has just started shipping, costs $24,999 per processor. The Developer Edition costs $499 per programmer, or is free to programmers who have a Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) Universal subscription. Microsoft says that it will ship a Standard Edition of BizTalk Server 2002 sometime this spring. The Enterprise Edition is aimed at customers who want to link to more than five applications and five distinct partners. The BizTalk Messaging Manager will not allow a sixth application or partner to be created in the Standard Edition, which sells for $4,999 per processor.

The company claims that it has trained thousands of partners and software developers on how to use BizTalk Server in the past year, and says that these companies have been instrumental in pushing the product's sales. Key BizTalk partners include Accenture, Avanade, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Compaq Global Services, Compuware, and KPMG Consulting.