Microsoft delivers RFID with BizTalk 2006 R2

Microsoft late Monday released BizTalk Server 2006 R2, its first software with RFID support and the foundation for its SOA, supply chain and business process-management platforms.

The company said BizTalk Server 2006 R2 includes APIs and hardware frameworks so third-party vendors can tie their RFID wares into the platform. In addition, the platform will include a set of business rules and event-management capabilities so RFID events can be connected to back-end business processes.

Microsoft says the server will support business processes from the branch office to supply chains by tying real-time events to such business processes as connecting what is happening on the shop floor to partner networks and corporate systems, such as SAP.

In addition, Microsoft has added native support for electronic data interchange (EDI) and Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) and has added integration with Vista and Office. It also has included integrated support for vertical such industry standards as SWIFT, HL7, HIPAA and RosettaNet. Those connectors previously were add-ons but now are included with BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

Microsoft also released Enterprise Service Bus Guidance, which provides customers with architectural guidance, patterns and practices.

All the upgrades to BizTalk are designed to extend Microsoft’s business process-management platform to the edge of the network and beyond. They also are intended to deepen the integration of BizTalk with Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

Microsoft says the close integration of the three products, and other software in its platform lineup, will allow it to raise its reputation in the corporate data center and become the platform for critical corporate programs, such as trading-floor applications.

“We have delivered in one box the ability to extend a user’s core business outside the enterprise and connect all the way back to their core systems,” says Steven Martin, director of the connected systems product management at Microsoft. “It is a single platform for supply-chain automation, applications integration and process automation.”

The BizTalk integration with Vista and Office will focus on two WinFX technologies, the Windows Communications Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation.

The Communications Foundation is Microsoft’s middleware technology to support Web services. Microsoft will provide an adapter framework to help customers build customized adapters to bring applications, such as mainframe programs, into a Web services infrastructure.

With the Workflow Foundation, users that build applications that integrate workflow can track those through BizTalk. The workflow engine in the server, however, is not built on the Workflow Foundation technology but a proprietary workflow engine specific to BizTalk. With R2, Microsoft is only supporting integration between the two. Future versions of the server will be built on the Workflow Foundation technology, the company said.

In Office, users will be able to link workflows, such as those supported in SharePoint Server 2007, for document life cycles in business processes and track those using BizTalk.