Reliable Delivery over Any Transport

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A BizTalk document sitting by itself is a thing of beauty. However, it's meant to be used—not just admired and appreciated. A BizTalk document needs to be transported so that it can achieve its purpose. Getting your BizTalk document from your company to your trading partner's company requires some sort of delivery system. Since you are dealing with electronic information, you can make this delivery by using any process that transfers bits from place to place.

HTTP is the easiest way to transport these bits. HTTP is everywhere, and virtually all firewalls in the world allow HTTP calls to pass through them without question. But not all your vendors will have the ability to receive requests through HTTP, and some might feel uncomfortable transferring plain text over HTTP. One alternative to HTTP is File Transport Protocol (FTP), which requires a user ID and password. This login layer reduces the risk of receiving bogus messages. If your trading partners don't have FTP servers, they are likely to have e-mail. Your BizTalk server should be able to send messages over the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP). An SMTP server is designed to forward e-mail messages around the Internet.

If your trading partners are living back in the twentieth century, they might not even have e-mail, so a more primitive means of transporting your BizTalk documents might be necessary. For maximum flexibility, your BizTalk server should have the ability to send messages to a fax machine or even be able to print out messages so that you can send them by postal courier. These protocols are designed to deliver documents for humans to read, so your BizTalk server should also have the ability to render your business documents in a way that is suitable for a human audience.

The main problem with HTTP, FTP, and SMTP is that they are unencrypted by default. This problem is made worse by the fact that these transport protocols usually rely on the Internet, which exposes your request to anyone who has the ability to sniff TCP packets. That brings us to the next requirement: security.