C# App, MQSeries and IBM Mainframe

Hello,

My client (who is my project manager in a company insurance) asks me whether BizTalk is a good choice in the following technical context :

1/ We have a C# application which sends some data to IBM IMS mainframe via MQSeries : all the business rules are implemented in the Cobol modules in the IMS mainframe and there are no business rules in the C# application.

2/ In the C# application, the main tasks are : validate the XML message against some specified schema and convert the XML into the Cobol format and the cobol data into XML

For example, we have to send the following XML to some Cobol module : <driver><name>Vince</name><age>24</age></driver>,

but we need to convert this XML to a particuliar Cobol format, say

Vince|_|_|_|_|_| where |_| denotes the blank character

24|_|

and the mainframe sends back an answer like :

Vince|_|_|_|_|_|

24|_|

OK|_|_|_|_|_||_|_|_|_|_|

And we need to transform these data into XML : <response><name>Vince</name><age>24</age><comment>OK</comment></response>

So my questions are :

1/ Is this necessary to use BizTalk in a context where all business rules are implemented in the mainframe ?

2/ If we can use BizTalk for exchanging messages between the C# application and the mainframe via MQSeries, then

– how can we send the data (with XML format) to BizTalk (using Soap/Webservices, Http adapters ?)

– how can we do the transformation tasks (XML to cobol format and cobol data to XML) in BizTalk ? can we use schema mapping to do it ? or can we implement it in the pipelines of the receive port, send port ?

– I guess we use the MQSeries adapter between BizTalk and mainframe, but can it do the transformations between tow differents formats (XML and Cobol) as mentioned above ?

Any help would be much appreciated

Cheers

Xtasy.

PS : I'm just a newbie in BizTalk, and my project manager and I are willing to know much more about BizTalk.