What is BPEL?

January 29, 2007   21:33

Today I had to answer some questions that involved BPEL. So what is BPEL?

BPEL stands for Business Process Execution Language. When we connect the systems of two or more organizations, it might be useful or even necessary to know something about the business process from each company.

There are “easy” ways to share business process information between Business Process Management (BPM) systems when they are created by the same vendor. For example, with BizTalk Server 2006 you can use the Trading Partner Management technology to exchange this information. However, in real life, most companies use systems from different vendors.

To allow insight in each other Business processes Microsoft, IBM and others have created the BPEL language. The language is particularly useful to describe and sharing externally visible parts of a business process. BPEL is an Orchestration language which is built entirely on Web services. Inside BizTalk it is possible to export business processes that are designed with the Orchestration Designer into BPEL.

BPEL isn’t a complete language for defining business processes. For that reason it is hard to view it as a fully mature technology, but of course it keeps evolving. A more thorough explanation of BPEL can be found here.

Posted in What is | Permalink | Post first comment

What is BizTalk?

January 19, 2007   9:43

Now what is this blog all about? For a lot of people it is difficult to understand what BizTalk is because they will never notice it. BizTalk is not a normal Desktop application like Word or Excel. It does its work almost completely in the background.

BizTalk provides ways to make separate systems communicate with each other, without them knowing of each other’s existence. In the dynamic business world of today you often want to have a fast way to connect your systems with each other to exchange information through the company in a manageable way. Yes we are talking about Enterprise integration, which is a complex problem, even with a great and flexible product like BizTalk Server 2006.

Microsoft BizTalk Server solves this problem by creating an abstraction layer on which you connect each system. Inside this layer you can orchestrate multiple process flows and interaction between the systems. This can be inside your own company but also with your vendors or customers. As a result you can now easily change business rules and business processes, saving time, saving money. Thanks to the business activity monitoring (BAM) it is easy to keep track of the critical business operations, allowing you to jump into action on time.

With the help of normal tools like Microsoft Visio, Analysts and programmers can create a clear view of the business processes and implement them in the IT-structure. BizTalk Server uses mainly XML messaging which enables it to talk with an almost unlimited number of applications, devices, services, and many more possible objects written in a variety of programming languages.

Posted in What is | Permalink | Read 1 comment