Pro EDI in BizTalk Server 2006 R2 - Electronic Document Interchange Solutions

EDI is going to be big, and is already seeing a lot of adoption. Comments from Burley Kawasaki, Director of Project Management - Connected Systems Division at Microsoft (heads where the future of BizTalk is going). "Contrary to popular belief, EDI transactions are growing - and on a very large base. Not because customers are using EDI for new applications, but because they are putting more and more suppliers into their existing EDI feeds and doing more electronic business. With this much electronic business being done over EDI, companies are looking for ways to bring down TCO on general operations (hence the interest in swapping out expensive legacy systems with newer MS platforms) and also reducing the per transaction cost (hence the interest in moving away from VANs and migrating to AS2 over the Internet). I can't share w/ you our estimates for our market opportunity w/ BizTalk R2, but suffice it to say we wouldn't have built EDI into our core engine if we didn't think it was a pretty mainstream opportunity for us to go after. MS doesn't tend to pursue niche opportunities." In summary: solid book, solid topic where we have proven success, new angle where lots of money is being spent and there exists very little documentation, electronic or print.