If you asked IT professionals about Microsofts offerings in the area of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) you did not get an answer.
It is not that they had nothing to offer it just seemed that Microsoft did not think that from a marketing perspective it was the right strategy to sell an ESB as a product.
But in fact with Biztalk Server they had the infrastructure whose functionality would be best described as ESB functionality (adapters, message subscription, content based routing, transformation, etc…).
The strategy changed now as Microsoft offers ESB Guidance.
It comprises guidance, components and services that allow to use Biztalk Server as a pure ESB.
Features are:
– Intelligent Routing
– Message Transformation
– Itinerary Processing
– Legacy and LOB Application Adaptation
– Service Orchestration
– Metadata Lookup
– Exception Management
– Distributed Deployment
– Centralized Management
– Business Rule Engine
– Business Activity Monitoring
After skimming through the documentation it seems that the EBS Guidance does not introduce any ground-breaking changes. It is more a description of Biztalk Server from the ESB perspective. It is an example of the modularity and extensibility of Biztalk Server.
Quote: “Many of these components and services rely on features implemented by BizTalk Server 2006, such as the Orchestration, Transformation, and Business Rules engines and the Message Box database.”
If someone asks today about Microsofts ESB offerings, the ESB Guidance is the place to look at.