Microsoft announced the public availability of a beta version of its BizTalk Server 2000, the company's new server product aimed at orchestrating Internet-based business solutions. BizTalk Server 2000 combines enterprise applications integration (EAI), business-to-business (B2B) integration, and the BizTalk Orchestration technology in a single product, allowing developers, IT professionals, and business analysts to more easily build dynamic business processes over the Internet. To facilitate this dramatic feature-set, BizTalk offers a variety of tools, some based on Visio, as well as a technology infrastructure.
"The technology challenge of the next five years is to realize the value of the Internet to connect and orchestrate companies and applications that today are lone islands," said Chris Atkinson, vice president of the .NET Solutions Group at Microsoft. "With BizTalk Server 2000 and the rest of the .NET Enterprise Servers, Microsoft is providing the technology to meet that challenge."
BizTalk consists of tools such as the Visio-based BizTalk Orchestration, the XML-based XLANG language for describing business processes, and other integration tools, as well as a framework built on industry standards such as SOAP 1.1, XML, and S/MIME. For more information, and the free download, please visit the BizTalk Web site
