The most valuable feature of BizTalk Server is that it will turn XML into flexible transactions.

We can implement complex mapping and integration across the account. We can split pipeline concepts based on requirements and process everything. It's based on the demand. Whatever it is, we can implement it in the XML Disassembler or .class file decoding. We can split, unzip, and encode pipeline concepts.

If you're working on Edifecs transactions, you need to create the business profiles and agreements based on how it will work and transform. It will process the transactions based on this identifier and the digital profiles.

When I'm working on development side data, we don't use any DevOps. We implement Orchestrator, and it's BTDF.

BizTalk's integration with Visual Studio is the most valuable feature of this product. It makes everything easier than if you are using external tools, or if those tools are not integrated with the developer suites. 

The tool's most valuable feature is its integration with the banks. Its messaging and routing capabilities are good. 

Software development, right from start, was custom and tailor-made. The most changing parts of these software products are the interfaces to the internal and external worlds; interfaces to other third-party software products, databases, file types, technologies, application software external to the system being integrated with.

Integration concepts must have evolved from device drivers. Earlier computer systems and their software environments were privately owned by vendors like IBM, HPE, Dell, Digital, etc.These vendors used to, and now also, custom develop hardware products and computer operating systems. The applications development in those days was called proprietary development. The only common thing was the programming interface exposed to developers and computer operators called computer languages like COBOL, C, Pascal, FORTRAN, etc.

The computer systems evolved from large-sized minimal processing machines to, nowadays, compact laptops, cell phones, IoT devices and supercomputers. These computer systems had main systems and external devices called peripheral devices. These devices later became interoperable amongst the hardware and software vendors and were being produced by third-party vendors. This introduced the concept of a device driver to be able to plug and play the devices. These device drivers separate from the internal intricacies of the devices from the main machine's operating control, and handle tasks on their own.

The same concept is being used in software integration tools like MS BizTalk. Here, intricacies of the software systems - their internal operations, methodology developed by different different developers - used to be called spaghetti code. These complications of internal systems were to be isolated from the system being integrated to and were separated by integration software.

The integration software like MS BizTalk has adapters (as I mentioned earlier) for various external systems. These adapters are ready-made (encapsulated) functionality for a specific technology (File, FTP, MSMQ, web services, EDI), databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.), application platforms (SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, healthcare adapters for HIPPA, HL7, etc.), or for integration with a system under development being integrated to these external systems.

What integration software achieves is, it isolates business logic (if-then-else, business rules, loops, exception handling, etc.) required to control the data, concurrently (multi-threaded), and does validation of data, special handling, and routing. In achieving this functionality, it isolates the external interfaces' handling logic in the adapters, main control of process flow in workflows (called BizTalk Integrations), and ports (ports are the locations where process control and data is to be delivered).

There are receive-only, send-only, and send-receive ports. These MS BizTalk Integrations can be subscribed by connecting the dots between systems, by connecting to ports, just like an electrician connects wires, a plumber connects connectors, a construction worker connects bridges to the roads, tunnels are connecting two end of mountains, or a railway worker joins the tracks for railroad.

The platform is more like a Lego landscape of different building blocks and the most valuable part is that they can be built and constructed independently. You have many degrees of freedom and all types of different applications for your business needs. In Luxembourg, I've been connecting bank interfaces, document management systems, and management systems for a two-month contract. Credit card interfaces and high deposits, etc. It was a very complicated workflow. The solution offers many degrees of freedom in order to connect different systems with complicated workflows and very complicated mappings.

First of all, it’s the concept of orchestrations which extends the tool from simply being responsible for “fire-and-forget” messaging pattern to a more powerful one allowing you to implement some sophisticated business processes. It may even use long running transactions. Apart from that, as a useful feature there can be pointed out, is a concept of various adapters. These adapters operate independently from orchestrations and mappings between initially created source and target schemas and it prevents from extra effort when modifications in data structure are required.

The feature of mapper design and orchestration with Visual Studio is valuable for us.

• Orchestration debugger
• Mapper tool
• Flat file schema designer
• Various adapters
• Ability to define XSLT transformation