Lizzie,
I understand your skepticism about a large number of vertical industry schemas being defined and used in the near term. I share some of it, but I believe it's not core to the real opportunity. There will probably be basic templates defined, and maybe a few successful, used schemas, but I believe that actual schemas used in real vertical business applications are created and refined when real applications are made to work together.
Clearly, ITWO, ARBA, and others have been successfully building these kinds of XML-based business systems. At the same time, that doesn't mean Microsoft can't, and I believe they actually will for some markets. I also believe it's in other other companies' interest to take advantage of something like Biztalk Server (as opposed to Biztalk schemas), which will add value to their applications by providing a way to publish their own schemas+workflow processes, then manage and enforce workflow state machines at runtime, regardless of the vendor their communicating with.
In fact, I consider Biztalk Server just a part of .NET, a piece of the puzzle. If you do end up looking at the Biztalk Server that was part of the PDC CD set or a more recent version, I'd be interested in hearing what you think, whether good or bad. I suspect that you would have an informed opinion.
Thanks,
Mike |
