Business Policy Management and the BizTalk Rules Engine

Earlier in the year we designed an architecture in which the BizTalk Rules engine was leveraged along with InfoPath, SharePoint and K2.Net to manage business policies in a human to human and human to system workflow solution. The full article can be found (here). We found this design to work extremely well in regards to providing an agile approach at managing business process policies in a generic way. Following is a brief fragement of this article.

RDA leverages the BizTalk Business Rules Engine to manage business policies in document workflow solutions. Document management workflows come in many shapes and sizes. Many of these workflows operate under rigid business policies, which often affect how documents flow through a process or influence decisions along the way.

Business policies are often fluid. They change with time. Any solution dependent on changing business policies must be agile by design. As such, the rules that govern the policy of a given document workflow needs to be easily maintained without affecting the solution deployed in a running production environment. The BizTalk Business Rules Engine provides just a mechanism.

The diagram below depicts a workflow system that leverages the rules engine to enforce and manage fluid business policies.





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Choosing BizTalk over WebSphere

The following is a good whitepaper providing a comparative analysis of Microsoft BizTalk and IBM WebSphere. Note while this whitepaper is a bit dated and BizTalk 2004 centric, its still very much applicable to BizTalk 2006.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/1/E/01E77F30-E571-478D-A8F8-F35FE66BD2BD/ChsBPASol.doc