REDMOND, Wash., Aug. 14, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the public availability of the beta version of Microsoft® BizTalk™
Server 2000. A member of the .NET Enterprise Server family of products, BizTalk Server 2000 will make it fundamentally easier to orchestrate the next generation of Internet-based business solutions. Eagerly awaited by customers and industry partners, BizTalk Server 2000 will unite, in a single product, enterprise application integration (EAI), business-to-business integration and the much-anticipated BizTalk Orchestration technology to allow developers, IT professionals and business analysts to easily build dynamic business processes that span applications, platforms and businesses over the Internet.
“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.”
Comprehensive and Unified Solution
BizTalk Server 2000 will offer a broad set of tools and an infrastructure to simplify and speed the orchestration of applications and businesses together into next-generation solutions:
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Rapid development of dynamic business processes. BizTalk Orchestration technology builds on the Visio® diagramming platform to provide a familiar graphical environment for quickly building dynamic, distributed business processes, and an advanced orchestration engine for executing and managing those processes.
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Easy application and business integration. BizTalk Server 2000 provides powerful tools to easily integrate applications and businesses both behind the firewall and across the Internet using industry standard XML.
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Interoperability with industry standards. BizTalk Server 2000 supports a multitude of transports and protocols in addition to XML, including EDI (X12 and UN EDIFACT), HTTP, HTTPS, Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ), SMTP (e-mail), and flat file transfer.
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Reliable document delivery over the Internet. Support for the BizTalk Framework ensures reliable,
“guaranteed once only”
delivery of business documents, such as purchase orders or insurance claims, over the Internet. -
Secure document exchange. BizTalk Server 2000 supports industry-standard security technologies such as public key encryption and digital signatures to ensure secure document exchange with trading partners.
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XLANG support. XLANG is an XML-based language for describing business processes.
To quickly and effectively build solutions that are flexible and interoperable, businesses today require more than just stand-alone products and services. In addition to BizTalk Server 2000, Microsoft, with industry partners, has led innovation on other enabling technologies that are necessary for Internet-based business solutions, including the BizTalk Framework and BizTalk.org.
BizTalk Framework
Based on industry standards for data exchange and security such as SOAP 1.1 (Simple Object Access Protocol), XML and S/MIME, the BizTalk Framework enables the secure and reliable exchange of business documents over the Internet. Development of the BizTalk Framework is overseen by the BizTalk Steering Committee, which is comprised of industry partners, consortiums and standards bodies.
BizTalk.org
BizTalk Server 2000 customers can also take advantage of BizTalk.org ( http://www.biztalk.org/ ), a community resource to accelerate the expression of business processes in XML. As the world’s largest open XML business process schema repository with over 400 industry schema, BizTalk.org provides immediate access to XML schema from industry standards bodies like ACORD, BASDA, the HR-XML Consortium and OAG as well as popular applications vendors like Autodesk Inc., Clarus Corp., Commerce One Inc. and Great Plains.
Groundswell of Industry Support
Customers and partners alike have already begun to build solutions with BizTalk Server 2000. Microsoft has been actively pursuing relationships with systems integrators, solutions providers and application service providers (ASPs) in anticipation of the demand for solutions built with BizTalk Server 2000.
“Our clients are experiencing a major challenge today with having numerous critical yet isolated applications in place that still can’t leverage each other effectively,”
said Karl Newkirk, managing partner, Andersen Consulting, Microsoft Solutions Organization.
“BizTalk Server 2000 is the technology that will now link those disparate applications and allow the business processes to”
talk together
“so that our clients can take full advantage of their IT infrastructure. Andersen Consulting is excited to drive the next generation of B2B and enterprise integration solutions based on BizTalk Server 2000.”
In addition, customers have already begun to build their next generation solutions on top of BizTalk Server 2000.
“VerticalNet views BizTalk Server 2000 as a strategic component of our marketplace platform,”
said Dean Sivley, senior vice president of Product Development and E-Commerce for VerticalNet.
“The combined capabilities of its robust document mapping and business process orchestration are ideally suited to address the diverse and rapidly changing requirements of today’s real-world B2B markets.”
Availability
The beta version of BizTalk Server 2000 is available immediately for download at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalkserver/ .
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
Microsoft, BizTalk and Visio are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries.
The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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