What’s new in TPM for BizTalk Server 2010!!
We are very excited to welcome the public Beta release of BizTalk Server 2010. We have some very interesting enhancements in B2B space in this release. I want to share a brief around the Trading Partner Management feature.
Trading Partner Management(TPM) is increasingly challenging in the exploding global trading economy. A huge heterogeneous mixture of business players are coming in with cost effective options to trade with.
Previous releases of BizTalk provided a functional party management offering that enabled customers to build solutions that needed party management data, but it did come with a few challenges around usability and scalability. To address the growing demand for a scalable TPM, we interviewed a number of customers from different market and sizes and incorporated their valuable feedback. With the new release of BizTalk Server 2010, we have rebuilt the TPM model ground up to meet the tactical and long term needs of the B2B players.
I want to lay out some of the key aspects that are new in TPM for BTS 2010. Detailed blogs would be based on your interest in the specific areas
Functional/Operational
ü Party Model enhanced ground up that would be Business user friendly:
a. Party, Business, Agreement, Protocol Settings: More intuitive model to reflect trading partners, their various businesses, partnerships and agreements between partners. Default Protocol settings to reflect the expectations and abilities of either party getting into an trading partner agreement
b. Inbound, Outbound Settings: Reflective of how business handles inbound messages and sends outbound messages
c. Directional Agreements: Agreements are made two part, one part each for the direction of messages
ü Centralized Business Identities: Identities that are used by the business are centralized without making them protocol-specific. This enhances the productivity as well, as business identities can be set/updated in one place and one time and not repeated across protocol settings
ü Message Type Inclusion/Exclusion: A configurable list of accepted Transaction/Message Types that the business wants to support. Greatly reduces noise of unsupported message types being exchanged and dropped.
ü Productivity around Agreement onboarding:
a. Ability to create protocol settings that are by default expected by a business and reusing them automatically in all agreements created with the business. Ability to override and specific setting as needed in the agreement
b. Ability to save agreements as ‘Agreement Templates’ and applying the same across all similar agreements by a click of a button
ü TransactionSet/Payload validation by Message type: No more validation settings at interchange level; now you set validation (‘leading trailing spaces, ‘extended EDI validation etc) for each message type differently
ü Enhanced Global/FallBack Settings: All the settings possible for an onboarded party can now be set in Fallback settings too(earlier releases didn’t support all settings in Global settings and for some users were forced to use pipeline settings)
Access
ü B2B Operator Role: A new BizTalk role that reduces the onus on the Admins to perform all Party management operations which was also sometimes security risk. The new role allows windows users associated with the role to perform all party management operations.
Upgrade Customers
ü Migration Tool: With all these changes comes a Party Migration tool that helps upgrade customers to easily move from the old PAM based model to the new enhanced TPM of BTS 2010 without having to redo the onboarding of hundreds of parties/agreements
These are the highlights that I wanted to call out and have you all try them out. Any feedback on the feature would be greatly appreciated.
Hoping that the feature excites you as much as it excites me, and looking forward to a great success!!
Until next time
Ravi
*TechEd Alert*
I will be presenting a session at TechEd 2010 North America on this TPM feature with a demo. If you want to see how it really works and hear the story of how this feature got build, do visit the session at TechEd on 9th June (ASI 304: Building Large B2B Integration Solutions on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010). See you folks there!!!