BizTalk.org

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BizTalk.org is a place where you can find out about XML in general and BizTalk in particular. The site has several sections to help the new user learn about the technologies and best practices, communicate with other users who implement XML and BizTalk, and get hold of tools to help in his or her quest to create more sophisticated and efficient business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.

If your boss comes to you tomorrow and says, "I want to be on line, I want to do B2B purchasing with such-and-such's system, and I want it tomorrow," BizTalk.org is the place to start. The site provides technical information to help you understand what schemas and applications a particular partner or industry group is using.

Peer-to-Peer Support

Many organizations involved in the standardization of business interchanges are more skilled in business-process modeling than in systems programming and XML. These groups can turn to the BizTalk.org Web site to discover the best practices for implementing their own schemas or to locate pre-existing XML schemas for use in their applications.

Probably the most important benefit of the BizTalk.org site is that it provides open access for anyone who wants to publish an XML schema or find published XML schemas. The mission of the site is to promote XML as a useful solution for businesses. To that end, BizTalk.org has two primary features. First there is the learning community, where people can find news and interact with their peers. This community takes the form of a set of open question-and-answer forums for issues related to schema development.

BizTalk.org's second major feature is a library of published schemas. These schemas are all prevalidated and stored within the library for anyone to access. A developer can be assured that the schemas found at BizTalk.org have been tested and are technically valid. Estimates indicate that up to 80 percent of the schemas available on the Web today have never been validated. Invalid schemas are worthless for validating XML documents—even documents created by the schema's publisher. Schemas submitted for publication on the BizTalk.org site go through a technical validation to ensure they do not contain errors. Samples provided with schemas are tested to ensure they are valid according to the schema they are matched up with.

The BizTalk.org schema hosting site provides around-the-clock access to schemas that have been published and authenticated. These schemas are available to anyone interested.

This schema-hosting site provides a neutral reference point and a resolvable URL for each published schema. Schemas hosted on BizTalk.org are version-controlled: once a schema is published, even the publisher cannot make changes to it. Version control is a critical service that any schema repository must be able to provide to be valuable. A business cannot rely on a repository that provides schemas that can change at any time.