Customer Reviews

BizTalk: Implementing Business-to-Business E-commerce

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

If you are a developer looking for examples and tutorials covering the BizTalk tools (Editor, Mapper, and Application Designer), don't buy this book. There is very little information about how to use these. The concepts of e-commerce and workflow strategies are discussed in detail. The title is misleading because it really does not explain how to "implement" the BizTalk server. I guess I am just spoiled from reading WROX books.

Somebody bought this book at my company. I already had a bad feeling as I read the feeble attempt at a poem at the start. As a newcomer to BizTalk, I'm looking for something practical to get me started building new systems and really understanding what makes such systems tick. All I found was pages and pages of abstract waffle, which left me with the question; so what? This is supposed to be a "complete technical guide" - a technical guide to what? on how to bore programmers perhaps, certainly not on BizTalk. Also; that Mr. Kobielus finds it so necessary to do this pathetic kind of pseudo-marketing seen here is, in my opinion, very sad and certainly adds nothing to his credence.

This books pretends to be the complete business and technical guide to BizTalk implementation. Such a book needs to be very practical in order to be useful. It needs to explain the specifications for the BizTalk Framework, how the BizTalk server works and how we can get it to work. And it also would be nice if the BizTalk server would be positioned against products that solve a similar problem as BizTalk does, such as integration brokers.

However this book is long on topics as B2B reference model, workflow in general, the structure of classical EDI messages, E-marketplaces, and relatively short on how all those concepts are applied in BizTalk. I would say that all those theoretical topics are confusing for the reader: why explain all the ins and outs of classical EDI including VANs and X.509 if the whole idea behind the BizTalk Framework is wrapping of XML messages and and transferring them via a transfer protocol as HTTP or MSMQ? The long explanation of generic workflow concepts would fit if the BizTalk server were a fullblown workflow engine, not for a product that according to the writer does not more on workflow than EDI. A clear description of the "orchestration" functionality of BizTalk would have been more at its place.

I got completely lost in the description of all the Windows 2000 E-commerce products (Biztalk Server, Commerce Server, Host Integration Server, SQL Server etc), also due to convoluted writing style. Also here important practical information is missing, such as how to build adapters to existing ERP systems or legacy systems; BizTalk has functionality for this!

I did not like the writing style, and the layout of this book is horrible. Lots of page-long tables filled with long slabs of text in small-print is not the right way to make things clear.

My conclusion is that this book is useless for architects, developers, and any company that wants to implement BizTalk.

This book might be good for high-level manager, however, a technologist is better off using the web to get more information than presented in this book.

This Book is not technical enough. It is more theoretical, so if you have to implement Biztalk, then I will recommand the Biztalk Book from Microsoft Press or Wrox.

It seems the author is trying to be cute (the poem up front was a early warning) and the flip attempts at Microsoft bashing sprinkled about just demonstrates an immaturity in general in his view of the software marketplace, and an absence of objectivity overall. The book has lots of B2B examples that just recently died off with the dot.com crash of 2000-2001. All in all, people will read this stuff for free in the industry press and airline magazines, but will feel ripped-off if the paid cash for it.

This book might be good for high-level manager, however, a technologist is better off using the web to get more information than presented in this book.

This book gave me a complete overview of BizTalk and its role in B2B products. Being an IT Director I needed a book that explained BizTalk and all the related technologies to help me understand its strategic role. This book is very thorough.