Last weekend I was at a wedding fair with my fiancée looking at the last remaining big things we need to get sorted for our wedding in August. While there, I ran into my brother in-law (to be) who is also getting married. As he works at my old company we naturally ended up talking shop. During this time  the girls were browsed for fairy dust or something. (I think it’s fair to say we aren't really there by choice. :-))

So during our discussion he told me about his boss asking him to get some Microsoft certs and he had a choice between BizTalk and SharePoint. At the time I said get the SharePoint certs as they are far more likely to get you a job in the future as SharePoint is generally more popular in the enterprise. After that I moved on and forgot about things.... until today.

As I was going for a walk during my lunch time I started to think about Microsoft’s current strategy for BizTalk and how there seems to be this awkward situation now that windows workflow has arrived. Having worked with both WF and BizTalk it is clear where the difference are between the products. I have listed these below.

1.) BizTalk is the enterprise solution and can scale (albeit costly), workflow is not currently seen this way.

2.) BizTalk comes with a set of adaptors/accelerators for EAI, workflow has WCF, but custom formats such as EDI are not backed in.

3.) BizTalk provides sophisticated BAM. Some work has been carried out to allow Workflows to integrate with BizTalk’s BAM but this can be considered just an integration point with BizTalk.

4.) BizTalk comes with productivity tool like the mapper. XSLT is still a rare skill and the mapper is not available for WF.

5.) BizTalk has a sophisticated rules engine. Workflow does not.

6.) BizTalk comes with Health and Activity monitoring.

Although there are many additional enterprise features that BizTalk has offer over WF, there is one issue and that needs to be addressed. That is, that Microsoft now has two retail workflow/orchestration engines. 

Having two workflow engine technologies is just not right, and Microsoft has recognised that. As a result  WF is due to be integrated into future versions of the BizTalk product.  However doing so raises a number of questions around the value of BizTalk as a product on its own right.  If WF provides the core orchestrations (which is really the selling point of BizTalk) then surely the other features of BizTalk are just extension to WF? 

Sample design surface for WF below

I am not sure in what way Microsoft will distinguish BizTalk from WF, but my thoughts are that the product will be reduced to a set of WF extensions for the enterprise.

I just hope in the not too distant future that the BizTalk runtime/hosting service will become part of WF core services. Doing so will increase WF adoption dramatically.

Update post here!