␡
- The Company
- Order-Fulfillment Process
- Problems with the Current Implementation
- Solution Requirements
- BizTalk Server 2004A Brief Introduction
- Proposed Solution: Hardware
- Messaging Protocols
- Proposed Solution: BizTalk Application
- Business Rules
- Tracking
- BizTalk Licensing
- Time Estimate
- Cost Estimate
- Implementation
- Conclusion
- References
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Problems with the Current Implementation
The current order-fulfillment process is handled by a set of disparate applications—typically, one application for each step. PinkAndBlue is facing a number of problems with this solution. Some of these problems include the following:
- Messages are lost at different stages, and there is no easy way to track the messages.
- The application(s) do not scale well.
- The applications fail often, and it takes a lot of resources to monitor them.
- Every time a small change is needed for the message format, code changes are required, and the whole application has to be retested.
- The transport protocols are not flexible. As an example, the credit card transaction-processing service provider recently moved from a custom API (on a dedicated TCP/IP connection) application model to a Web services model. This process resulted in significant hardware and software changes at PinkAndBlue.