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Introducing Microsoft InfoPath 2003 Part 2: extending InfoPath solutions with BizTalk Server 2004. (Enterprise Solutions).

Article Excerpt
In Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Vol. 4, issue 6) we looked at creating a solution that used a new product in the Microsoft Office System 2003 called InfoPath. In this installment, I'll show you how to extend the solution created in Part 1 using BizTalk Server 2004.

In Part 1, we created a form that collected new patient information for a health care customer. Once we completed the initial InfoPath solution, the CIO was very impressed with the fact that InfoPath leveraged existing back-end Web services and allowed the company to continue developing using the service-oriented architecture (SOA) that they had invested very heavily in. The CIO's next challenge for my project team was to build an InfoPath solution that extended the patient form and included workflow components. What he wanted was an easy integration into their back-end mainframe system. I can remember his exact words, "Integrate and they will come!" Now we'll do exactly that. I will show you how we extended the solution using BizTalk Server 2004 and how the enhancements in this version make it possible.

What Is BizTalk Server 2004?

BizTalk Server 2004 is the third release of this server product. When we started this project BizTalk Server 2004 was publicly available in Beta 1 (www.microsoft.com/biztalk/beta). This new version is designed to solve three basic common integration scenarios--Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business Process Automation (BPA), and Information Worker Integration. The redesigned architecture is built on two main services that enable these: orchestrations that provide the execution framework for business processes, and BizTalk Messaging that enables transformation and routing between business processes.

Orchestrations allow the design, execution, and management of a business process. Workflows are created and saved into executable XML files called an XLANG orchestration. XLANG is a proprietary execution environment of BizTalk Server, but the new version enables the exporting of orchestrations to the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services 1.1 (BPEL4WS) specification. BPEL4WS defines a language for...