From Pro BizTalk: Is BizTalk Suited for the Application in Question?
Refer to the fourmain types of BizTalk projects—workflow automation, legacy application integration, trading partner exchange, and organizational message broker scenarios. If your application has any of these types of pieces, BizTalk may be a fit. If not, you need to examine where and why BizTalk is being evaluated.
The key thing to remember in this type of situation is to define early in the solution’s design phase what data will be exchanged with BizTalk, what the schema definitions are, and how data will be returned to the calling application. Another key decision is to decide whether the main application requires a synchronous or an asynchronous response from BizTalk and what the threshold values are for an acceptable transaction. If the calling application needs a subsecond synchronous response from BizTalk to process the message, it is imperative that the system be sized properly to ensure that response times are acceptable. If the communication can be asyn- chronous, it is easier to restrict the flow of messages to an acceptable level either by using a queuing mechanism or some sort of batch processing.
