Extending Commerce Server Search Capabilities
Another area in which third-party offerings add value to Commerce Server is in extending the product's native search capabilities. The products that offer integrated search capabilities for Commerce Server are much the same as those for Content Management Server. FAST Data Search provides realtime incremental indexing. Inktomi's Web Search enables full-text search on natural language search terms and has a customizable UI. Mondosoft's MondoSearch integrates search capabilities with behavior tracking.
BizTalk Server 2002
Tackling the deepest e-business level, Microsoft designed BizTalk Server 2002 expressly to enable enterprise application and B2B integration. Using XML as the common data conduit, BizTalk Server enables application integration by providing document transport and routing, data transformation, and process automation. BizTalk Server provides a built-in BizTalk Mapper that maps your business documents to a business partner's documents or to documents that other applications in your organization use. For instance, you can use BizTalk Server to map your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system's purchase orders, invoices, and shipping manifests to the format that your business partner's ERP system requires. BizTalk Server's Orchestration Designer lets you build sophisticated document workflow based on Microsoft's XLANG standard without custom programming. Figure 3 shows BizTalk Server's Application Designer, which lets you define and build distributed business processes.
Microsoft offers four BizTalk Server 2002 versions: BizTalk Server 2002 Enterprise Edition, BizTalk Server 2002 Standard Edition, BizTalk Server 2002 Developer Edition, and BizTalk Server 2002 Partner Edition. The Enterprise Edition is targeted at large organizations and supports integrating unlimited internal applications with unlimited trading partners over the Internet. The Enterprise Edition also supports multiple processors and clustered deployments. The Standard Edition is designed for small and midsized organizations and supports integrating a maximum of 5 internal applications with as many as 10 trading partners. The Developer Edition offers the same features as the Enterprise Edition, but you can use it only for development—you can't deploy it in a production environment. The Partner Edition supports integrating as many as 2 internal applications with a maximum of 2 trading partners.
BizTalk Server 2002 runs on the Windows 2003 servers, Win2K Server SP2, or Win2K AS SP2. The Enterprise, Standard, and Developer Editions of BizTalk Server 2002 also require access to a SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 7.0 system. The Partner Edition ships with a bundled version of Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE), obviating the need for an existing SQL Server installation.
The increasing number of BizTalk Server installations has also fueled growth in the BizTalk adapter market. BizTalk adapters are software components that let BizTalk Server integrate with third-party applications. Microsoft and its business partners provide adapters that facilitate integration with software from SAP, J.D. Edwards, Siebel Systems, Onyx Software, and other vendors. In total, more than 300 third-party adapters are available to plug in and add functionality to BizTalk Server. You can find the complete list at http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/adapters/adapterslist.asp.
Extending BizTalk Server's Document Parsing
One of the more important capabilities that third-party products can add to BizTalk Server is extended document parsing and transformation. For example, Datawatch's VorteXML is a powerful custom parser that transforms formatted text such as that found in invoices, purchase orders, shipping documents, and HTML pages into valid XML documents without programming. FormScape Enterprise Plus can also receive a document from a source system such as an ERP system and transform it into a different format (e.g., XML), then pass the results to BizTalk Server for routing and tracking.
ItemField's ContentMaster for BizTalk provides data-extraction and -conversion software solutions for transforming unstructured data formats into XML without the need for programming. Web2XML's Web Integration Engine (WIE) integrates existing Web sites into the BizTalk Server framework, letting BizTalk Server users access data from sites which aren't BizTalk Serverenabled.
Extending BizTalk Server to incorporate EDI documents and standards is another important front in which third-party products add value. Edifecs' SpecBuilder helps you create, edit, and publish document specifications and provides an extensive library of EDI standards, including X12 and EDIFACT.
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