BizTalk Orchestration Futures

Here's an article I wrote for the .NET Developers Journal (http://www.sys-con.com/Dotnet/article.cfm?id=447) on some cool future-tech. I think of this as “BizTalk 2006”.

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BizTalk Orchestration Futures
* Live from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference *
By  Brian Loesgen

(October 30, 2003) - Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a friendly giant came down from the mountain with a gift for developers… Sorry, wrong audience. BizTalk Server 2004 was officially unveiled at Tech-Ed 2003 in Dallas, just a few short months ago. BizTalk Server 2004 is a phenomenal product. While most of the concepts from prior versions are still evident, everything from the core messaging engine out has been rewritten - and exciting new capabilities and tools have been added. The product is tightly integrated into .NET and the Visual Studio IDE, giving .NET developers a powerful new tool for their arsenal.

In view of the fact that the first public beta was just released, it seemed somewhat strange to see an even further-out version of the orchestration engine. However, Abhay Parasnis, group program manager for the BizTalk team, showed exactly that at the PDC during a session on BizTalk Orchestration futures.

It is important to note that this is just a version of the orchestration engine, not a new version of the product. It is a scaled-down, lightweight, rehostable orchestration engine suitable for simple workflows.

His demonstration scenario showed tight integration with both Visual Studio and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). The sequence was:

A "workflow template" – a Word document that can have a workflow associated with it - was opened in Word.

A workflow was attached from WSS.

In a graphical depiction of the workflow, actors (my word, he did not use this term) were assigned to workflow tasks.

The document was saved to WSS, creating SharePoint tasks for the actors (i.e., people with a pending workflow step would see it as a pending task in SharePoint).

Workflow task states were updated (e.g., "completed", "approved") by various actors in Outlook.

For one of the steps, a workflow task was delegated to another actor, also from Outlook. The status of the task remained the same, but the task had been delegated, and this could be seen in WSS.

The real magic here is that the new lightweight orchestration engine was not only being hosted server-side in WSS, but also client-side, in Outlook. This is very different from prior versions of the BizTalk Orchestration engine, which were always server-side. Equally intriguing was the statement that it could also be hosted in Indigo, which I interpret to mean that this could be a good way to orchestrate Indigo services.

BizTalk Server 2004 will bring tight integration with Visual Studio. However, what was shown today goes even further: whereas with BizTalk Server 2004, developers will create special BizTalk projects, in this future version they will simply add workflow elements to regular projects.

An extensive API will expose a comprehensive object model, allowing for (among other things) programmatic creation of workflows. This could open up new doors for third-party vendors.

The extensibility mechanisms were very impressive. Developers will be able to take common parts of orchestrations (single elements or "chunks" of tasks) and make them into components, parts of a "workflow service library" that become available in the toolbox. In addition, developers will be able to create new primitives (task shapes in a workflow) for the first time.

Having worked with BizTalk a lot since the inception of the product, the first thing that struck me was that this far-future version seemed to require a mind shift. Whereas prior versions were message oriented, this new version seemed more task oriented. This is, I believe, a side effect of abstracting business process automation to make it more approachable.

So when can we expect to see this as a product or add-on? Not anytime soon. This was a very early look at some innovative work that builds on the excellent work that’s being done right now on BizTalk 2004. It will certainly change a lot as time goes by and new concepts evolve and solidify. In the meantime, download the BizTalk 2004 beta to get a taste of what the near-future holds.