Professional BizTalk® Server 2006

12.4. The Business-to-Business Scenario

The Business-to-Business scenario (B2B) covers a solution developed by a fictional company called LitWare, which provides a distribution network that enables customers and brokers to place orders with vendors.

The primary focus of the scenario is to enable orders received from customers to be routed to the appropriate vendors for processing. Each order, depending on its contents, will require different vendors to be used, and they will change over time. In light of this, the scenario is loosely coupled to enable easy modification of vendors and suppliers, and provides a centralized way of modifying this information.

The scenario makes use of the Trading Partner Management System to enable business users to control customers and vendors involved in the trading partner network without having to modify the technical solution. Generic orchestrations then identify how to communicate with these partners by retrieving profile information from the Trading Partner database.

The design and implementation of the scenario was done with the BizTalk Server 2006 release and does not take into consideration the new EDI features provided with BizTalk Server 2006 R2. If you choose to adopt some of the approaches within the scenario for your solution, you may want to review the EDI documentation for R2 to understand if other alternatives are available.

12.4.1. Highlights

In line with the previous scenarios, there is complete documentation for the B2B scenario ...