• Microsoft BizTalk
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    Industry Support: XML Applications




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    Ceponkus, Hoodbhoy - Applied XML - Toolkit for Programmers

    Industry Support: XML Applications
    Like any big-picture-savvy businessperson, you probably want some assurance that XML 
    is the right technology to invest in and to start supporting in your organization. You want 
    examples of other companies that are currently investing in XML and want to know what 
    they are doing with it right now. If you’re the entrepreneurial sort of person, you already 
    know that now is the time to be developing XML tools and applications and are looking 
    for niche areas where you can develop products and solutions.
    To help support our contention that XML is the real deal and to help convince you that the 
    industry has already warmed up to it, we’ve taken the liberty of reviewing a few XML 
    applications that some of the industry bigwigs have introduced recently. Unfortunately, 
    due to the fact that anything written on paper in the IT industry is obsolete almost before 
    the ink dries, many of you may find this as old news. Nevertheless, these are excellent 
    examples of XML applications; however, it is extremely important to realize that the most 
    important and impressive XML applications have not yet even been dreamed of. These 
    are just the first generation of a long line of applications to come!
    Microsoft BizTalk
    Microsoft announced its plans of releasing a new framework for e-commerce whereby 
    software would play a much larger role in business than it does today. This is perhaps 
    one of the largest applications of XML with very far-reaching implications if it works.
    The idea behind BizTalk is very simple: to provide a universal vocabulary for software 
    among businesses that describes all their processes. You can see how XML as universal 
    method for describing information fits in here very well.
    What Microsoft realized was that the reason that businesses aren’t doing a lot of e-
    commerce with each other right now is because they lack the standards that are both 
    comprehensive and cost-efficient. EDI, the Electronic Data Interchange format, though 
    very comprehensive, is expensive to implement and has thus been used mostly by large 
    corporate customers. EDI provides an excellent way of describing standard business 
    transactions, such as purchase orders or invoices, but isn’t very good at describing 
    nonstandard procedures. Nevertheless EDI is the preferred method of choice for 
    business transactions in the corporate world. BizTalk does not seek to change that.
    BizTalk focuses on a very large number of business processes going beyond where 
    Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems go. They not only encompass business 
    procedures within an organization, but also preclude knowledge level systems. 
    (Knowledge level systems include technical processing systems, such as engineering 
    systems and manufacturing systems.) The idea is to make all aspects of the data used 
    within an organization accessible to each branch of the organization. This stage is 
    achieved by ensuring that all documents within the organization either are in a native 
    XML format or can be easily converted back and forth to XML. Microsoft hopes that all 
    application vendors will start supporting XML as an information exchange medium. This 
    makes sense—after all, XML is an open standards system.
    Current e-commerce systems give you a really boring look at what you’re buying. Half the 

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    fun of shopping is finding out all the details about the product before you buy it. You talk 
    with a salesperson about the product and find out whether it works in certain conditions 
    or what products are complementary to it. That richer information experience is currently 
    not entertained in most e-commerce experiences. By melding information from all parts of 
    an organization with XML, online shoppers get all the information they want about the 
    product before they purchase it. This makes the online shopping experience that much 
    more comprehensive. Figure 2.15 summarizes our understanding of BizTalk.

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