BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is one of the most underutilized BizTalk features. BAM provides a view into currently running and completed business processes for both business users and IT administrators. This information can be viewed at an instance or aggregate level. BAM provides business users and organizations with the infrastructure to learn more about themselves through information captured about their business processes. BizTalk Server 2006 includes a new BAM Portal, an ASP.NET 2.0 Web site for viewing BAM data and setting up notifications based on BAM data. BizTalk Server 2006 also includes an installation option for deploying the BAM assembly anywhere in a purchasing organization.This means it can be used from business processes or parts of business processes that don't run in BizTalk at all. The benefits of BAM are that it provides visibility into business processes and that it can be used to increase the ROI associated with a solution by engaging business users and making them active actors in business processes. Neither of these benefits requires much effort from the implementation team.

BUSINESS ACTIVITY SERVICES
Business Activity Services (BAS) is another feature associated with business users. BAS lets business users create and modify profiles, which represent internal or external business entities that are part of the business processes implemented in BizTalk. Business users can also configure these profiles so that they're used in a given orchestration. The benefit of this feature is that it enables business users to configure which trading partners an orchestration interacts with instead of working with an IT administrator to make the configuration changes or interact with developers to modify the solution's implementation.

ENTERPRISE SINGLE SIGN-ON
Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) provides facilities for using different security credentials than those credentials that were used to originate the business processes. This is useful when communicating with systems where the originating security context will have no meaning. SSO can also be used to store configuration data securely in BizTalk for use in orchestrations, custom adapters, etc.

BizTalk's core features provide a tremendous amount of functionality that can be used in many different situations and in some case with little effort from the solution team. Many of these features are useful to business users, IT administrators, and organizations, not just developers. BizTalk has many other high-value features, many of which will be reviewed briefly before concluding this article.

Additional BizTalk Features

• Administration Tools - The administrative tools are vastly improved in BizTalk Server 2006. These tools have been improved enough that they could be considered an administrative framework with their own benefits for administrative and operations teams.
• Support for Multiple Message Types - BizTalk's internal message format is almost always XML but it has facilities for working with flat-file documents as well. Binary messages are also supported in pass-through scenarios or by using specific techniques for using them in orchestrations.
• Transport Independence - Messages are almost always transformed to an XML format as they come into BizTalk. Additionally, orchestrations support the ability to use logical ports that aren't tied to specific protocols, applications, or endpoints. Both of these options provide support for implementing orchestrations generically without regard to the transport (adapter) that messages come through. There are many benefits related to this but the most important one is the opportunity for reuse when additional systems need to participate in a business process that has already been implemented in BizTalk. In some cases, no new development will be required.
• Scalability and High Availability - BizTalk has been architected to be highly available with features such as multiple BizTalk processes, multiple BizTalk servers in a farm, clustered BizTalk services (new to BizTalk Server 2006), and using SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 as its data repository. When implemented correctly, BizTalk applications will never lose a message (not that a message won't fail during processing). BizTalk servers can also be easily added to existing BizTalk farms, which makes scale-out easy. It's also easy to add additional BizTalk processes and endpoints that can improve availability and throughput.
• Tracking - This feature is essentially an auditing feature that can record message bodies and message context, as well as each step that a message went through in BizTalk. This feature can be very important in compliance scenarios involving HIPAA and SOX. .Developers and IT administrators also use tracking data for debugging BizTalk applications.

Conclusion
BizTalk Server contains many valuable features that together create an integration and business process automation framework that can't be matched by most homegrown frameworks. Combined with the facts that enterprise integration, business-to-business integration, business process automation, and business process management are all becoming more prevalent in and across organizations, BizTalk will become a much bigger player in organizations' solution architectures in the coming years.