What is BizTalk Labs?

BizTalk Labs is where Microsoft shares early access to experimental connectivity and business process technologies in order to get feedback from customers.

What is an Internet Service Bus?

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a commonly deployed set of technologies that most large organizations use to make it easier to build and maintain complex Enterprise applications.

An Internet Service Bus (ISB) is the evolution of this approach that leverages advances on the Internet to make it easier to connect applications between organizations and to integrate with browsers, RSS, and other Web technologies. You can learn more here.

What are the business benefits of an Internet Service Bus?

An Internet Service Bus substantially reduces the effort and costs associated with building and maintaining a wide range of connected applications.

Using an ISB, developers are more productive, and businesses are more agile. With an ISB developers can create applications often in hours, where previously they could be developed only by large, well-funded teams operating on a time-scale of person-years. You can learn more here.

What are the major pieces of an Internet Service Bus?

An Internet Service Bus consists of a set of integrated hosted services that includes: naming; application messaging (including routing and publish and subscribe); identity and access control; and workflow and business process management. You can learn more the major pieces of an Internet Service Bus here.

Do I need BizTalk Server to use the Internet Service Bus available at BizTalk Labs?

You do not need to have BizTalk Server deployed to use the services at BizTalk Labs. Using hosted connectivity services reduces the setup time and configuration effort associated with managing your own servers. In fact, if you have a Web browser you have everything you need to make use of some of the capabilities of our Internet Service Bus hosted at BizTalk Labs.

Does the BizTalk Services support standard Internet and Web protocols? Can we use the Internet Service Bus with products from other vendors?

Yes, our BizTalk Services support a wide range of Internet, Web, and enterprise protocols. Because the Internet Service Bus available at BizTalk Labs supports these industry-standard protocols it can be used with a wide range of Web browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and others) and other products from IBM, Oracle, SAP, and other companies. For simple uses, our services can be accessed using standard Web protocols such as HTTP and RSS. For advanced features like end-to-end, message-level security, we support existing standards such as SOAP and WS-Security. In addition to the interoperability capabilities described previously, Microsoft is also developing a range of innovations for which no standards yet exist. In some cases, utilizing these advanced capabilities from non-Microsoft platforms may require additional work by the platform vendors or independent developers.

When will the services at BizTalk Labs be available as a product?

At this stage the services and the SDK that are available at BizTalk Labs are experimental. We do not yet know when, or if, these technologies will be available as products. An exception: the WCF Web programmability enhancements that are in the SDK are relatively far along in the development process; these capabilities will be available in version 3.5 of the .NET Framework, which is code-named "Orcas", and is currently available as a beta.

How will you charge for the services at BizTalk Labs?

At this stage all the services at BizTalk Labs are experimental and we have not made any firm decisions about whether these will be available as products or how we will charge for them.

Will we be able to host our own instances of the services at BizTalk Labs?

One of our top design goals is to ensure that you can host, in your own data center, instances of the services we deliver. However, as these are experimental services we have not yet made any firm decisions about which services will be delivered or when the ability to host them independently will be available. John Shewchuk discusses this topic in more detail here.

Can we use the services at BizTalk Labs in our products?

The services that we have made available at BizTalk Labs are experimental and should not be used in production environments.

We really want to use these services in our products right away. Is there any way you could accommodate us?

If you have an urgent need to use our services in a production environment prior to general availability, in certain circumstances we may be able to provide selected services in a managed environment with a limited service-level agreement. If you want to investigate this option please contact your local Microsoft representative to arrange a conversation with the Connected Systems Division (CSD) Cloud Services Group.