Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

Chapter 12. End-to-End Scenarios

End-to-end scenarios (E2E) are somewhat of a trade secret, despite the fact that there is a huge amount of supporting documentation and all the source ships as part of the BizTalk SDK. They are sometimes referred to as super samples, but, in my opinion, this does them something of a disservice.

The E2E team was the first customer of BizTalk Server (2004 and 2006 releases) and was required to sign off on BizTalk Server 2006 being fit for release. The team worked with a number of high-profile and innovative customers to ensure that BizTalk could meet their highly challenging requirements, and helped the customers design and implement their scenarios in the best possible way.

The E2E team then distilled the important techniques and approaches used within these scenarios to architect and design three E2E scenarios (based on real-world customer scenarios).

The implementation of these three scenarios was performed by a dedicated team and leveraged best practices throughout. To address each scenario's requirements, a number of frequently requested BizTalk features were developed as part of the scenario, which we'll cover later in this chapter.

Each scenario was then put through highly challenging, production-quality performance testing. The results were then used to improve BizTalk's overall performance before launch.

Key people from the Microsoft field community were also rotated through the E2E team at regular intervals to provide further real-world ...