Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

Chapter 5. Orchestrations

As you've already seen in Chapter 3, using BizTalk Server to implement content-based routing solutions is relatively straightforward. Routing messages based on the content within those messages is often the first step toward solving a business problem, but often a business process will need to be followed to determine how messages will be processed.

BizTalk orchestration enables you to graphically design business processes using a sequence diagram metaphor instead of the conventional approach of writing extensive amounts of source code. This sequence metaphor means that a business process may graphically illustrate a business process, thereby providing a representation of the business process that is easer to understand than code.

The business process is expressed graphically through BizTalk orchestration as a number of shapes, each performing specific operations such as send, receive, executing business rules, branching, looping, sequential processing, and correlation. Coding a business process in this abstracted way greatly removes the amount of plumbing code required to implement a business process. In short, you can concentrate on solving the business problem rather than on technical implementation.