I need to do something similar and was going to just use a .NET compnent when someone pointed me to "Pro BizTalk 2006", Chapter 5 (ISBN: 1-59059-699-4).
I need to take more than 100 files in a batch and compress and send them individually via http://ftp. Since I can file drop them locally, I can setup a receive pipleline to take care of this after the batch completes or at anytime we need. Don't forget file naming standards as well.