Microsoft BizTalk Server is an inter-organizational middleware system (IOMS) that automates business processes through the use of adapters which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in an enterprise. Created by Microsoft, it provides enterprise application integration, business process automation, business-to-business communication, message broker and business activity monitoring.
BizTalk Server was previously positioned as both an application server and an . Microsoft changed this strategy when they released the AppFabric server which became their official application server. Research firm Gartner consider Microsoft's offering one of their 'Leaders' for Application Integration Suites. The latest release of Biztalk (Biztalk Server 2020) was released on 15 January 2020.
In a common scenario, BizTalk integrates before going out and manages automated business processes by exchanging business documents such as purchase orders and invoices between disparate applications, within or across organizational boundaries.
Development for BizTalk Server is done through Microsoft Visual Studio. A developer can create transformation maps transforming one message type to another. For example, an XML file can be transformed to SAP IDocs. Messages inside BizTalk are implemented through the XML documents and defined with the XML schemas in XSD standard. Maps are implemented with the XSLT standard. Orchestrations are implemented with the WS-BPEL compatible process language xLANG. Schemas, maps, pipelines and orchestrations are created visually using graphical tools within Microsoft Visual Studio. The additional functionality can be delivered by .NET assemblies that can be called from existing modules—including, for instance, orchestrations, maps, pipelines, business rules.
Version history
Starting in 2000, the following versions were released:
2000-12-01 BizTalk Server 2000
2002-02-04 BizTalk Server 2002
2004-03-02 BizTalk Server 2004 (First version to run on Microsoft .NET 1.0) 2006-03-27 BizTalk Server 2006 (First version to run on Microsoft .NET 2.0) 2007-10-02 BizTalk Server 2006 R2 (First version to utilize the new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) via native adapter - (Release date 2 October 2007)) 2010-04-27 BizTalk Server 2009 (First version to work with Visual Studio 2008) 2010-10-01 BizTalk Server 2010 (First version to work with Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET 4.0) 2013-03-21 BizTalk 2013 (First version to work with Visual Studio 2012 and Microsoft .NET 4.5) 2014-06-23 BizTalk 2013 R2 (First version to work with Visual Studio 2013 and Microsoft .NET 4.5.1) 2016-09-30 BizTalk Server 2016 2017-04-26 BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 1 (Application Insights and Power BI integration; Swagger-compatible REST Management APIs) 2017-11-21 BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 2 (Azure integration) 2018-06-26 BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Pack 3 (Office 365 integration) 2020-01-15 BizTalk Server 2020 (First version to work with Visual Studio 2019 and Microsoft .NET 4.7)