Microsoft BizTalk Server is a server product for Business Process Management and Enterprise Application Integration, developed by Microsoft.
BizTalk enables organizations to integrate their business processes and manage through the exchange of electronic business documents ( such as purchase orders , invoices, delivery notes , etc. ) between applications in XML, JSON and other formats , as well as outside the boundaries of the organization . BizTalk supports several standard EDI formats such as EDIFACT, X12 and RosettaNet , and there are plenty of adapters available for facilitating connections to several platforms (including SAP and PeopleSoft ) via various protocols such as HTTP , FTP and SMTP.
BizTalk Server uses the Microsoft .NET technology and supports both SOAP and RESTful and Web Services. Software for BizTalk Server is done through Visual Studio .NET .
A mature product on its 9th release, BizTalk Server 2013 R2 provides a solution that allows organizations to more easily connect disparate systems. Including over 25 multi-platform adapters and a robust messaging infrastructure, BizTalk Server provides connectivity between core systems both inside and outside your organization. In addition to integration functionality, BizTalk also provides strong durable messaging, a business rules engine (BRE), EDI connectivity, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), RFID capabilities and IBM Host/Mainframe connectivity.
The BizTalk messaging system is mainly based on XML, as all incoming message to this Middleware are convert into a readable XML message, through a pipeline. BizTalk then lets you develop your own logic to process the messages through the application. The three main kinds of processing are done through Orchestrations, Maps and XSLT code.
BizTalk Server 2013 R2 has added more Cloud Integration capabilities and has support for REST
BizTalk Server 2016 Developer Edition is available for MSDN Subscribers or through Visual Studio Dev Essentials On Azure you can get a prebuild VHD with Biztalk 2016, SQL server 2016 and Visual Studio 2015