How a BizTalk Orchestration Easily Defines Business Processes

Communication between different systems is essential to automating business processes, which is the core problem BizTalk services help address. BizTalk orchestrations help define and execute process logic for many applications that require it.

An automated process in a common language like C# or Visual Basic is entirely possible to create – but writing, maintaining and managing complex business processes can be very challenging and time consuming.

BizTalk orchestrations create graphical representations of business processes

Creating a business process graphically using a BizTalk orchestration is not only less time consuming, but easier to understand, explain and change.

Basically, a business process is a set of actions that works together to meet a desired business need... a purchase order approval process, work order approval or even inventory control are all good examples.

To create a successful automated business process, BizTalk developers and business people must work together. BizTalk Microsoft provides a software tool for each process that simplifies matters.

BizTalk developers use an add-on tool that runs in Visual Studio that only software programmers are able to understand and use– therefore, an add-on to Visio makes it easy for business people to collaborate with their peers in IT.

A developer defines actions by connecting “shapes” in a logical way using the BizTalk Orchestration Designer

Fundamentally speaking, a BizTalk orchestration process receives a message from a send adapter and a decision is made based on the message’s content. Then, one of two paths is executed as a result of that decision.
See examples of the different “shapes”

After an orchestration is created, the group of shapes and their relationship to one another is converted into a standard .NET assembly by the BizTalk developer.

In recent years, SOAP based web services have become a more significant consideration for BizTalk developers ... the BizTalk server accesses external web services by including a WCF Service Consuming Wizard that allows developers to create orchestrations that use web-based services via SOAP or any other WCF mechanism. The WCF Service Publishing wizard helps a developer easily expose one or more of an orchestration’s operations as WCF services.

See a basic example of what an orchestration looks like by clicking here.

Bookmark and check back soon with the Carnal Software knowledge center for more information on the BizTalk orchestration process and the Business Rule Engine - a tool that makes it easier to define and change business rules for a significant subset of processes.