BizTalk 2006 R2 LOB (Line of Business) Adapters

In general the BizTalk Server (BTS) provides the adapter framework for building of adapters. One adapter is fundamentally a module which implements the connecting mechanism with some proprietary external (from the point of view of BTS) system.

Practically, there are there are three kinds of adapters:

• Application adapters
• Database adapters
• Transport adapters

Application adapters provide an interface to Line-of-Business (LOB) systems like SAP, Siebel, Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft.

Database adapters provide an interface for dealing with relational (daenet has also experimented with WinFS adapters too) databases like Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2.

Transport adapters provide an interface to transport protocols like HTTP and FTP and message-oriented middleware (MOM) like Tibco, Websphere MQ and MSMQ.

The BizTalk Server 2006 R2 introduces the new kind of adapter called LOB adapter. One LOB adapter is technically the adapter which implements BTS adapter framework, but it is exposed as Windows Communication Foundation Channel. Because, the WCF conceptuality provides high degree of integration in .NET platform one LOB adapter can be even Application-, Database- and Transport-Adapter. More over, such concept enables developers to focus on ore on business processes (less on adapter framework).

This is a reason why this kind of adapter is called LOB. Note that this kind of adapter is one more step in direction of Microsoft strategy “Line of Business Integration”