Update: BizTalk 2004 To Add Rules Engine, No Price Hike

Pricing will remain the same as with BizTalk 2002, but Microsoft said it is packing a lot more functionality into the new release, due early next year. When the beta disks were distributed in June, the expectation was for the product to ship late this year.

BizTalk 2004's new rules engine will let integrators set up systems that will trigger alerts when they hit a certain condition.

"You can engineer a really rich environment based on business rules in conjunction with orchestration," said Eron Kelly, lead product manager for Microsoft's e-business servers group. "If this event happens, it kicks off an alert. It's particularly great for the financial services industry."

"What's great about it is it's business-analyst focused; you don't have to be a hardcore .Net techie to modify the rules," said Peter Tripp, who is global practice leader for Microsoft Integration Group at Unisys, Blue Bell, Penn.

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Microsoft is also adding to the number of supported connections in Standard and Partner Editions. The current BizTalk 2002 Standard Edition price includes connections to two trading partners and two internal applications. The new version will up both numbers to three. The Standard Edition had supported 10 trading partners and five applications, but the new 2004 release will support 20 partner connections and 10 internal application links, Kelly said.

The additional connections "will help make the partner and standard editions more attractive to some clients. However, unless they've also enabled them to be clustered or support multiprocessing, then many clients will still need to purchase the [pricier] Enterprise Edition," said one West Coast solution provider.

Microsoft has also built more "seed" technology into the package so that solution providers can pre-configure BizTalk to run with pre-specified applications and implementations.

"If you're Ford and have a hub, the partner can build a seed package to be delivered to smaller Ford suppliers that can be easily installed and configured," Kelly said. "The seed package knows how a given company wants to be traded with, which processes are in place, what the security settings are. You can take all that information and build a seed package based on that which, when installed at the small business, is configured to follow these processes exactly."

For developers there is also much tighter integration into Visual Studio. "The Orchestration Designer, BizTalk Mapper and Editor all used to have their own user interfaces, now they're all hosted in the Visual Studio IDE so any developer will see if BizTalk is deployed and can work with it," Kelly said.

BizTalk 2004 will also ship with an InfoPath license to let partners or IT personnel more easily configure business processes, he added.

For more on BizTalk Server 2004, see related story.