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Other than that, there isn’t really much to Organizations. All the details about agreements and routing information is added at the Port and Channel level (see below).

Ports

Ports are “Outbound Agreements”. This means that a Port specifies the routing destination of a message. The destination can be an Organization (see above) or an Application (see below). Ports do not necessarily reference business partners, but there can be ports for internal routing or to the Home Organization. Imagine a scenario where West Wind Technologies places an order with EPS Software Corp. That order is received (through a Channel, as described below) and then routed to the Home Organization for processing.

You can create a new port from the File menu (chose File/ New/ Port). To implement the scenario I just described, we create a Port to an Application (since we are not routing to a third party, but to an application maintained by the Home Organization). When defining a Port, one of the first settings that needs to be specified is the Application name (see below) and more importantly, the primary transport mechanism:

The transport address specifies the mechanism and destination to be used for the document. In the example above, we chose to route the document to a file named c:\testorder.xml. This is a very simple setting we will use for our first routing example. There are several different routing mechanisms that may be utilized. Available are HTTP and HTTPS to route to a web server, SMTP to route as an email, File for local files, Message Queues to invoke Microsoft Message Queuing Services, Application Integrator Components for custom destinations (see below) and “Loopback” to route the message back into the BizTalk Routing Services. Previous versions of BizTalk Server as well as statements from Microsoft indicate that this list may grow. The Technology Preview version (that is the version of BizTalk Server that was made available before Beta 1) supported a Fax as a destination.

For internal routing (to an application), the provided information is sufficient and you can accept all the other defaults in the wizard.

A second kind of Port you will encounter frequently is a Port to another Organization. When we proceed with our scenario above, we realize that we need to send some kind of confirmation once West Wind placed the order. We can do this through a Port to West Wind Technologies. Here are some important settings for this scenario:

First of all, we need to specify the Destination Organization. In our example, this is West Wind Technologies. We could also create a Port that has an Open Destination. In that case, the receiver would actually be specified in the message that is routed. These kinds of messages are named “Self Routing Documents”. I will discuss these later in this article.

Just like in the internal Port, we also need to specify a transport mechanism and an address. In this case, either HTTP, HTTPS or SMTP make sense. The first two mechanisms would target the West Wind Web Server, which would be the preferred way if the partner has set up a B2B system that can handle our response. However, this is not always the case. For this reason, I chose to send a simple confirmation via email.

In subsequent steps of the wizard, we can also set up security and encryption information as well as some other advanced settings. But for this example, we’ll ignore those.

Ok, so now we know how to route a document that’s in the BizTalk system. However, we do not know how to route a document into the system. This is done through Channels. Every Port needs to have at least one Channel in order to be useful. When creating a new Port, BizTalkautomatically asks you to create a new Channel for the port (unless you deselect that option in the last step of the wizard).

Channels

Channels define the “Inbound Agreement”. They will route a message from an Organization or Application to the assigned Port. While doing so, the document may actually be converted (mapped) to fit our internal standard. In our example above, we need to create a Channel for West Wind Technologies so an order can be submitted. When setting up a Port, you are automatically asked to create a Channel as well. If you deselected that option, you can right-click on a Port in the Management Desk and select New Channel/ From an Organization. This launches the following wizard:

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