We currently use Biztalk 2004 for in-house message routing. It seems to me that Biztalk is a bloated, difficult to work with monster.
We have several higher ups in the organization who believe Biztalk to be the be-all and end-all when it comes to integration with our various systems. We had a consultant come in and do the some preliminary configuration and development.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the “benefits” of Biztalk. I’m told that its drag and drop interface is easy for a non-developer to use, but I’d like to meet the non-developer who’s got the patience to figure out all the functoids on the mapper. Also, I’ve never had an instance of Biztalk where I didn’t have to write some kind of helper class to include in my project, and this seems to be by design.
Biztalk is difficult to debug, even through HAT. Biztalk has the most cryptic error messages I’ve ever worked with. Also, it takes six rather powerful production servers to manage the not-very large amount of message traffic we handle.
I’m quite willling to accept that my development experience level/ability keeps me from truly understanding the magnificent creature that is Biztalk. My feeling right now is that either our Biztalk configuration is really messed up, or that Biztalk is not a good fit for our organization.
Has anyone had any good experiences with Biztalk?