At my last place of employment, I used BTS quite a bit. However, I've noticed that managers often want to use it for the wrong things, and developers are hesitant to adopt it.
So, I'm just wondering, how's BTS being used? Please post experiences, not theories. Thanks!
We have a few dozen applications that need to interact. We have a single web service based application which controls passing messages between systems. Other systems talk to it and receive messages from it via BizTalk orchestrations etc.
We do use BizTalk to connect up to a third party ordering system. I would probably classify this as a useful, yet beginner approach to using the vast capabilities BizTalk seems to offer. By this, I mean we only use a fraction of the functionality. It goes something like this:
The solution ended up working fairly well and has been in production for a few years now. It's one of those things that just works.
One thing I would note is that while developing this we tried to use the Mapper tool to help us with the translation part of things. Our translation was quite complicated and the tool itself was super tedious to use. Since we were comfortable with xslt we ended up writing our own and not using the graphical Mapper tool. It seems that the Mapper tool would be very useful for simple translations, but anything over a handful of elements starts to become a maintenance nightmare (IMHO).
I've worked as a consultant for one the largest oil/energy companies in Europe and they basically use BizTalk for all their messaging/integration stuff. Examples are: Invoices (electronic invoices) sent from and to partners in different formats, sync jobs between AD and third party software that maintains it's own username db and integration between support system and external customers via e-mail. So they have a pretty broad adoption of BizTalk and use a cluster of 5 servers.
In the past I've used BT (2004) for ecommerce purposes (ordering, order acknowledgement, delivery notification, etc) in a B2B environment and it worked really well. This is probably the bread-and-butter of BT in that it is the most obvious place for it to sit in an organisation.
These days I'm (almost) involved in an entirely internal BT project that is initially handling a massive data-load from a legacy system into a new app, and going forward will handle the messaging between another legacy app and the same new system. Probably not the most efficient use of technology, but the infrastructure is now in place to implement an Enterprise Service Bus type architecture that is viewed as "the saviour of our business". I've yet to be convinced on that thinking, though. :S
Personally have developed for:
Procurement: handling buying request for a hospital to different manufacturing companies. These companies would have varying xml requests sent out to different companies, where each manufacture will have it's own style. All purchases then were also made into a html/xslt report (in house receipt) showing what was bought at what prices.
HL7: Handle a huge amount of HL7 files being processed at once (think it was setup to handled 4 at a time), processed and placed into a new folder for that day.
I developed some Hl7 solutions using the HL7 Accelerator,managing the workflow of a claims application system, integration between disparate systems using a generic approach for message routing, etc.
All good fun and a lot of work... ;-D
We currently use BizTalk 2006 at our company for communicating orders from a Commerce Server 2007 instance and a host of stores that are all running Dynamics RMS to our main ERP, Dynamics NAV. BizTalk is certainly a powerful solution but I do consider the learning curve fairly steep and agree with others on StackOverflow that have said it is the most complicated server produced by Microsoft.
For what it does it is rock solid and if there have ever been problems with the system it has been on one end of the chain or other other but never with BizTalk.