Understanding Application Integration Components

AICs, commonly referred to as adapters or connectors, are COM components that extend the capability of BizTalk Server to integrate with external systems. They expose one or two programmatic interfaces that enable BizTalk Server to reference an AIC as an outbound transport. AICs are deployed at the BizTalk Messaging Port and are one of the transport types that BizTalk supports. Therefore, sometimes AICs are referred to as transport adapters.

Microsoft is working to provide adapters for ERP systems with many third parties, such as SAP, J. D. Edwards, and PeopleSoft, and marketplace vendors, such as Ariba, Commerce One, and Clarus. The Microsoft BizTalk Server team took the initiative to develop a few key adapters including one for SAP that will be sold as an add-on to BizTalk Server. The BizTalk SAP adapter is currently in Beta. To name a few others, Xceed Software provides an FTP adapter for BizTalk, and Travis, Inc., provides an adapter for Oracle Financial. To see the most current list of vendors and the BizTalk adapters they provide, go to the site http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/adapters.asp.

BizTalk Server provides three different ways to develop AICs, using the IBTSAppIntegration, IPipelineComponent, and the BizTalk Scriptor Component. The IPipelineComponent and the Scriptor Component are the same mechanism used in Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0 Pipeline and in Commerce Server 2000 Pipelines.