Microsoft's BizTalk Services Simplify SOA Darryl K. Taft, eWEEK

Microsoft has delivered a set of new services based on its BizTalk Server technology to help developers build new SOA-oriented applications.

Microsoft BizTalk Services, announced on April 24, 2007 include BizTalk Identity Services, which provide authentication, access control and federated identity based on the WS-Trust specification. The new BizTalk Relay Services facilitate the traversal and bridging of physical networks, enabling high-fidelity interconnection between cooperating systems for cross-organizational messaging behind firewalls. The new Internet Service Bus provides a simple publish-and-subscribe message bus. And the new BizTalk Workflow Services enable the designing applications graphically by drawing flowcharts. John Shewchuk blogged:

"Today many businesses run on an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB provides applications with a uniform set of mechanisms for naming, discovery, message routing, publish and subscribe eventing, message transformations, workflows, and so on. Here at Microsoft we think our Server platform does an excellent of job of providing a comprehensive set of ESB technologies though Windows Server, the .NET Framework, and BizTalk Server. Even thought setting up these products is pretty straight-forward, to really get everything configured just right and deployed can be daunting... especially for federated composite applications that span organizational boundaries. So we are extending our technologies, and the notion of an Enterprise Service Bus, to seamlessly work as a hosted service, thus creating the first Internet Service Bus. The BizTalk Services CTP is intended to give developers an early look at our thinking about how we can bring these capabilities together."