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Generating real-time high volume website information using BizTalk 2006 R2

Providing up to date information to customers and citizens is an essential part of any major public sector transport provider's business, but with information changing every minute this is by no means a simple task.

CTO Geoff Ballard explains more about the benefits of BizTalk 2006 R2

With any large transport infrastructure, large volumes of new data feeds are being issued every minute, with new information arriving about expected arrival times at hundreds of destinations and updates on issues relating to the entire transport infrastructure. The requirement for a fully automated system that can deliver large volumes of real-time data directly to a website is therefore an obvious conclusion.

One approach to web scalability and resilience is to post the web content to a massively replicated set of web servers. Any page can then be served directly to any user from any web server. This is great in principle, but only works with static HTML pages!

BizTalk 2006 R2 comes to the rescue

• Custom BizTalk Adaptors can request data feeds at a frequency of less than 1 minute, all carefully time-sequenced to pick up the data just after it changes
• Orchestrations, mappings and XSLT take the feeds and generate multiple HTML fragments for each part of the client website
• Error handling and data tracking are handled at adaptor, pipeline and orchestration level. This ensures an immediate notification of incorrect or late data feeds is sent to the provider for display on monitoring dashboards
• An email can also be sent directly to the parties responsible for a specific data feed that has failed

Using BizTalk 2006 R2 - the results

• Large volume of data feeds into the BizTalk based system in real time
• Creates fully compiled HTML directly out to a customer-facing website
• Fully scalable and up-to-date website feed with no need for dynamic web pages

Find out more about our BizTalk 2006 solutions

If you would like to know more about new Microsoft products or technologies, or how Ballard Chalmers can help you, please contact Andrew Chalmers on andrew.chalmers@ballardchalmers.com or call 01342 410223.

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