1. Introduction

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The growing maturity of Internet-based secure transport protocols, combined with ubiquitous support for these protocols across networking, hardware, and software platforms, is enabling businesses to develop new ways to facilitate efficient and automated interactions. These interactions can occur between their own internal lines of business; productivity and knowledge management applications; the applications used by their customers and partners; and services provided by their commercial and corporate providers.

The challenges associated with enabling such efficient, automated interactions between applications across business boundaries, and in a cost effective manner, are similar to those associated with enabling them within an enterprise or departmental boundary. However, a new dimension of challenges in the areas of security and reliability must be addressed in order to communicate with other organizations.

These challenges of interaction across business boundaries include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Lack of a sufficiently-flexible and rich universal language to specify, package, publish, and exchange both structured and unstructured information across application or business boundaries.
• Lack of a flexible and rich universal language to specify, package, publish, and execute transformation rules to convert information from one format to the other as application and business boundaries are crossed.
• Lack of middleware-neutral, application-level communication protocols that enable automated interactions across application or business boundaries.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) and XML-based schema languages provide a strong set of technologies with a low barrier to entry. These languages enable one to describe and exchange structured information between collaborating applications or business partners in a platform- and middleware-neutral manner.

As a result, domain-specific standards bodies and industry initiatives have started to adopt XML and XML-based schema languages to specify both their vocabularies and content models. These schemas are becoming widely published and implemented to facilitate communication between both applications and businesses. Wide support of XML has also resulted in independent solution providers developing solutions that enable the exchange of XML-based information with other third-party or custom-developed applications. Several solution- or middleware/platform-specific approaches have been taken to address the lack of middleware-neutral, application-level communication protocols. However, no single proprietary solution or middleware platform meets all the needs of a complex deployment environment.

These proprietary initiatives have generally resulted in customers facing broad interoperability issues on their own. The BizTalk™ Framework addresses these interoperability challenges in a platform- and technology-neutral manner. It provides specifications for the design and development of XML-based messaging solutions for communication between applications and organizations. This specification builds upon standard and emerging Internet technologies such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Subsequent versions of the BizTalk Framework will be enhanced to leverage additional XML and Internet-related, messaging-standards work as appropriate.

It is important to note that the BizTalk™ Framework does not attempt to address all aspects of business-to-business electronic commerce. For instance, it does not deal directly with legal issues, agreements regarding arbitration, and recovery from catastrophic failures, nor does it specify specific business processes such as those for purchasing or securities trading. The BizTalk™ Framework provides a set of basic mechanisms required for most business-to-business electronic exchanges. It is expected that other specifications and standards, consistent with the BizTalk™ Framework, will be developed for the application- and domain-specific aspects.