I get alot of questions about this – for those of you who have been mentally scarred
with early editions of BizTalk (haven’t we come along way since then 🙂 there was
a BizTalk Partner Edition (lower priced for hub/spoke type implementations)
which was limited in some way with the number of Orchestrations/Tradining Partners
etc etc. (like 10 Orchs, 2 partners from memory).
With BizTalk 2006 R2 we have the Branch Edition which
retails for approx USD$1500 and it gives you……..
– BizTalk Business Rules Engine (alot of people are wanting to use
the BRE as a centralised rule store in a cost effective manner, until now it was BizTalk
Standard at least that you needed to get, as the BRE is not available separately)
– BizTalk RFID (what can I say here!!!)
A perfect application of the Branch Edition is to drop this in on
your trading partner’s site typically meaning less time to get up and running (for
the price, if consultants are spending more than 1.5 days trying to establish communications
with the other end, then you should be considering the Branch Edition as
it understands all the classic forms of comms with BizTalk ‘proper’. By
no means is it limited to just BTS)
I thought I’d also give you the more formal description of what the Branch
Edition has/has not under the hood:
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BizTalk 2006 R2
Branch Edition
BizTalk Branch Edition is a specialty version of BizTalk Server designed for hub and
spoke deployment scenarios including RFID.
Scenarios:
1. Hub-Spoke
Deployment. In this scenario the Branch edition is located in the regional / or point
of sale locations and communicate with the hub (BizTalk Enterprise Edition).
2. RFID
Deployment. In this scenario the BizTalk Edition applies rules and business process
to the raw data and communicates with the hub (BizTalk Enterprise Edition) to send
aggregated business data.
3. Standalone
Deployment. In this scenario the Branch Edition is used to execute a business process,
execute rules on the business data but not communicate with any central or hub.
Supported Capabilities:
1. General
Transport Adapters like FILE, HTTP, HTTPS, MSMQ, FTP, SMTP, POP3 are available
2. RFID
Manager and RFID Adapter
3. Host
Integration Adapter
4. Remote
or local SQL Server database is supported. SQL Server Databases may be installed on
a failover Windows Cluster providing high availability of the BizTalk Databases.
5. BizTalk
base capabilities like Messaging, Orchestration, BRE, BAM, Management & Operations
and Development Tools are available
Limitations:
1. No
Line of Business Adapters are available.
2. No
Accelerators are available.
3. Only
one BizTalk Application can be deployed.
4. BizTalk
Server Group supports only one BizTalk Server. This means there is no fault tolerance,
no scale-out, and no failover clustering
5. A
maximum of 2 – Processors are supported
6. No
Virtual Processor is supported. This means the dual core is not leveraged in dual
core processors
7. Two
or more Branch Editions separately deployed in different locations cannot communicate
with each other
References:
1. http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/editions/default.mspx