BizTalk workflow vs NinTex workflow tool

A customer recently asked about the interoperability of the Workflow modelling tool NinTex (on top of sharepoint) with other systems like BizTalk. Since i was not familiar with NinTex i downloaded the SDK, some product sheets and the help to find out about the capabilities to interop with other systems.

Since workfows can be developed quite easily with NinTex the first customer question was;

‘How can the flows from NinTex be used in developing BizTalk’.

NinTex has the ability to export the developed workflow to (unfortenately) an propietary format only. This means that it it not possible to re-use even parts of this workflow in for example visio.

" A workflow can be exported and saved in the file format ".nwf" in order to be used in another location. "

http://nintexdownload.com/HelpFiles/NW2007/NintexWorkflow2007UserManual.html

The second question was related to integrating with NinTex;

‘How can BizTalk provide integration in such a way that the back-end is controlled by BizTalk and the front-end is controlled by NinTex’

NinTex is a fairly extensive tool and has integration capabilities. The following means make integration possible;

- Use the schemas defined in the tool and export these as schemas

- Leverage the integration capabilities of Webservice

- Use the BizTalk shape inside NinTex to communicate directly with BizTalk

Note: Communicate directly means that the correlation/schema features are used, on the BizTalk side it means that the orchestration must be published as a webservice.

Conclusion

BizTalk is good in integrating with back-end systems by the provided Adapters, NinTex is a tool that can be used to develop workflows in a easy to use interface. Integration capabilities with BizTalk are available and making the combination of NinTex as a Fron-End mediator and BizTalk as a Back-End mediator with systems as SAP / HR Soft and others an obvious choice when NinTex is already the standard within the organisation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azure implementation guidelines

In My post ‘ Service Bus Management ’ I pointed out a way of implementing a DTAP strategy for managing the Service Bus environment. There’s now a great post available from Microsoft which goes into more detail about other aspects of managing the Azure subscriptions and other artefacts which is quite useful when setting up your Azure environments. Follow this link to the ‘Azure Implementation Guidelines’ HTH, Sander
Read more

UK Connected Systems User Group – BizTalk Services questions

This Wednesday I’m attending the CSUG – The Hybrid Organisation (sold out!). During my evaluation of several Integration products (BizTalk / BizTalk Services / Neuron ESB / MuleESB) I had some concerns/questions on BizTalk Services. My goal is to get answers on the following scenario a) I receive a HTTP Post with an Xml Body payload b) This contains a signature which i need to validate c) Transform the Xml body payload to another Xml message d) Perform a HTTP Post with the new Xml message to an external HTTP url and sign the message e) Route the response back, similar to the aforementioned steps, where an error needs to be mapped to a dedicated error response Challenges I'm wondering how to cope with some of the following challenges in this scenario, and would like to know resource information available which addresses some of these challenges; Validating / Signing of messages A requirement is to validate the incoming message by inspecting an signature in the message
Read more

Setting up a build server with the BizTalk Deployment Framework

Image
This chapter describes the steps to a TFS Build Server to set up BizTalk deployment with the following functionality: • Build solution • Perform unit testing Using BizUnit • Create Deployment Packages Using BDTF • Deploy to Server Using R packages created in previous step • Create documentation BizTalkDocumenter For this the following steps are required: • Installation Components (30 min) • Configuring a build account (30 min) • Setting up the build service (30 min) • Scrum template installation (30 min) • Share for the build output directory (10 min) • Adjustments Build Template for use BTDF (30 min) • Design of build definitions (60 min) • Setting BTDF (60 min) • Use BTDF • Build execution / scheduling UPDATE (21-06-2013) - When using sharedassemblies, the following URL is a big help http://mohamedradwan.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/set-custom-assemblies-path-for-host-build-service-on-the-cloud/ - For viewing the basic instructions a video is available on the following blog http:
Read more