Operations

Unique dashboards for unique requirements

Your BizTalk environment and solution will be unique to your own circumstances. Therefore, your dashboard should reflect the reality of your own setup. BizTalk360 comes with a very powerful dashboard platform that allows you to customize it in the way you want it — powerful out of the box widgets, ability to build your own dashboard to bring data from external sources (like CRM, SAP, etc), and you can also have multiple dashboards for multiple scenarios.

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Secure your BizTalk environment and audit user activities

Security and Operational auditing (governance) is one of the core features of BizTalk360. It provides the right amount of access to the support people. For example, providing developers read-only access to the production system, and also auditing all their activities like starting send ports, stopping host instances, terminating suspended instances etc. Think about your business cost in the following scenarios:

• A developer sneakily deploying a latest (non-tested) component in your production environment!!
• A technical support guy seeing confidential messages like patient health records or a $1M financial investment from a high net worth client and and so on!

Visualise the end-to-end transaction without any BizTalk knowledge

BizTalk is a loosely coupled publish-subscribe system. If you need to understand the flow of messages from A to B using the standard BizTalk admin console, you need to be a BizTalk expert. BizTalk360 solves this problem by visualising the message transaction in a graphical way and pinpointing any problems on the path by extracting the information already present. You need not develop any components or make any code changes to your existing system to take advantage of the graphical message flow functionality.

Don’t let your talented BizTalk developers waste their time on application support

Take a moment and answer this question – Who is involved in supporting your BizTalk solution? Is it a dedicated non-BizTalk resource or your talented BizTalk developers? Sadly, the answer will be BizTalk developers! The standard BizTalk admin console requires deep knowledge of the BizTalk server and it’s impossible to hand it over to non-BizTalk resources. BizTalk360 solves this challenge by providing controlled access, customizable user interface, rich dashboards, powerful troubleshooting tools; thereby making it possible to support your BizTalk solution using non-BizTalk resources.

Troubleshoot operational problems in a fraction of the time

Generally, people who are supporting BizTalk solutions would need to use anywhere between 7 to 10 different tools on a daily basis. Example: Admin Console, SQL Management Studio, BAM Portal, ESB Portal, Event Viewer’s, Performance Consoles, Monitoring Consoles etc. The consequences include, lost productivity in diagnosing problems, a steep learning curve understanding which tool to use under which circumstances and time spent setting security at different levels. BizTalk360 addresses these challenges by providing a single unified tool with enhanced security and governance.

Business rules editor designed for business users

The standard BRE composer that ships with BizTalk is designed for an IT person and not for a business user. Whenever business rules require a change (Example: increase discount to 40%), the business user needs to contact IT, the IT person has to make the necessary changes and go through the full deployment cycle.

BizTalk360 addresses this challenge by providing a web based business rules composer that allows Business users to modify the rules directly and also deploy it in production right from the web interface. Of course, we have full control on providing access to who can edit and who can deploy, along with full auditing capability on who made the changes.

Exception management & edit-resubmit messages

Lot of customers take advantage of the “ESB Toolkit – Exception Management Framework”. However, the ESB exception management portal that ship with the toolkit is just a sample web project (not to mention, it comes with quite a few bugs!). BizTalk360 ships with a nice/modern interface to query your ESB exception data, with capabilities like edit and resubmit messages, bulk re-submit of messages and very powerful monitoring and alerting capability. Example: You can monitor for any errors that occur in your payroll process application every 15 minutes and alert the relevant person/team.

Build your self-service knowledge base repository

In a middleware platform like BizTalk, there will always be some known problems during your day-to-day support. Example: Contoso Inc., occasionally sends messages with some junk ASCII characters that break. A partner occasionally sends a purchase order with the wrong date format etc. BizTalk360 helps to associate Knowledge Base (KB) articles with error conditions (you can tag them with the specific application, instance status, instance name etc). When the same problem reoccurs in your environment, BizTalk360 will intelligently match those articles and display them for the support people, thereby saving huge time in diagnosing the known problems from scratch. This also helps when you bring new people on board; they will be up to speed in no time at all.