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BizTalk Management Desk

The BizTalk Management Desk is used to create, establish, and maintain relationships within a corporation and between a corporation and its partners. These relationships are built on agreements, which are rules that determine how information is exchanged. Each agreement has a source organization and a destination organization, or an internal organization and one of its applications. The first step in creating an agreement is designating a default organization, which can be either the source or the destination for every agreement. Applications can also be either the source or the destination, but not both. If an application is used, it must be part of the default organization. There must be at least one document definition defining which documents the source can send to the destination. An open agreement means that either the receiver or the sender, but not both, are open. An open-source agreement always has the designated default organization as its destination organization; an open-destination agreement always has the designated default organization as its source organization.

An agreement defines the movement of information in one direction. If the default organization is the source, it is an outbound agreement. If the default organization is the destination, it is an inbound agreement. Outbound agreements oversee the movement of information out of BizTalk Server 2000, and inbound agreements control the movement of information into BizTalk Server 2000.

How BizTalk Management Desk works

In this section, we are going to look at how BizTalk Management Desk works. Follow these steps:

  1. Click the Start button, point to Programs, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000, and then choose Microsoft BizTalk Management Desk. You will see a Help window displayed that describes the steps you need to take in order to move information between corporations. The first time you use the BizTalk Management Desk, you'll need to select a default organization.

  2. In the upper right corner, click the Select button in the Default Organization box. This will bring up the Select An Organization screen. If you do not have an organization yet, click New. This will bring up the Organization Editor. For this example, we'll create an organization for Northwind Traders Corporation.

  3. In the General Tab, type Northwind Traders for the Organization Name in the Organization Identifiers section. In the Identifiers tab you will see that there already is a default Organization identifier named Organization. All organizations get this default, do not delete or change it. You can create as many identifiers as you want, but if you are using an X12 format, you should create a two-character identifier as the default.

  4. To create a new identifier, type NWT in the Value field of the Identifier tab, and check Set As Default.

  5. Click Refresh to add the new value to the list of identifiers.

NOTE
BizTalk Management Desk also allows you to create custom names with a qualifier and to associate applications with the default organizations, but we will not go into this in this example. Refer to the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 Help file for the detailed information.
  1. Click OK in the Organization Editor, and then click OK in the Select An Organization box. You should see Northwind Traders listed as the default organization.

  2. The next step is to create an agreement. On the File menu click New, and then click Agreement. This will bring up the Agreement Editor. We will make this a movement of information within the Northwind Traders Corporation from its central location to its European location.

  3. Type Northwind Traders Europe in the Agreement Name field in the Agreement Editor.

  4. Click the Destination icon. This will bring up the Select An Organization screen again.

  5. Click New, and create an organization called Northwind Traders Europe. In the Identifiers tab, give it a value of NWTE, and set this as the default. Once you have created Northwind Traders Europe, select it as the destination.