Sylvain Duford's Integration Blog

Enterprise Integration and the Microsoft Platform

BizTalk 2004 documentation woes

I love BizTalk 2004; it's a great product that provides pretty much everything that was on my wishlist. It has a few rough edges, especially from the developer's viewpoint, but by and large, it is a very compelling product.

My biggest beef with BTS 2004 is the documentation. This is a product with a steep learning curve and the documentation doesn't help a bit. There are entries for pretty much everything, but most of them are superficial and provide no insight on how to use the product. For example, look at the following entry in the BTS .chm file:

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Operations includes the administration and management of Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 applications. These tasks are facilitated through the following tools and consoles.

  • BizTalk Server Administration console. Use this tool to manage the BizTalk group, including all of the BizTalk databases.
  • Health and Activity Tracking (HAT) tool. Use this tool to track the performance of business processes.
  • Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) Framework. Use this tool to track data items and business milestones collected during business transactions.
  • Business Activity Services (BAS). This tool integrates with Microsoft Office and Windows® SharePoint™ Services to provide an intuitive interface through which you manage all of your trading partners and their associated business processes.
  • Human Workflow Services (HWS) Microsoft Management Console (MMC). Use this tool to construct and monitor your workflow.

For the latest operations information for BizTalk Server 2004, go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=20616.

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Believe it or not, that is the entire documentation on “operations” with BTS 2004. Pretty useful uh? And if you follow the provided link, you get a small .htm file that promises a documentation update will be coming out on April 2nd. If you go to the TechNet BTS site, you get some help for 2000 and 2002, but nothing for 2004! Nothing, zip, zilch...
 
Let's hope that the April 2nd update will be a major one... I guess this is good for consultants like us, but geez, sure makes our life harder...
 
ciao
Posted: Mar 17 2004, 11:07 AM by SylvainDuford | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Jim Martin said:

I completely agree. I love the product, my company has been using it since the beta days in an agreement we have with MS for a Proof of Concept we did. I too find the documentation horrible, but I'm sure they will fix that soon.
# March 17, 2004 11:23 AM

Steve Iatropoulos (MS) said:

We hear you loud and clear. The April docs will be substantial and we will also be releasing to the web an SDK soon with a tonne of samples.

Thanks for your patience!

Steve
Biztalk team UK
# March 17, 2004 7:01 PM

Scott Woodgate (MS) said:

Echo Steve - and if that doesn't please you we will continue to release documentation quarterly and will be taking feedback
# March 31, 2004 9:11 PM

hung said:

I know that xlang schedule 2004 needs some account to run under.
I use a domain account that has admin right to the domain.
Now, I have an orchestration in biztalk 2004 calling some web service.
If I use anonymous authentication for the web service virtual directory, the orchestration works fine.

If I use windows authentication (that should authentication the admin account I run Xlang under), the orchestration failed!!! The event logs said the error is due to the web service virtual directory permission.

Do you know why? Logically, my set up should work, but it does not.

Thanks,
Hung
# April 13, 2004 8:09 PM
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