What does BizTalk Server do?

Most Microsoft products provide some feature/functionality in the mindset of internal Microsoft people and customers alike. Microsoft Exchange Server owns e-mail, SQL Server owns the data tier, and IIS is Microsoft's web hosting solution. BizTalk Server is Microsoft's premium enterprise integration solution. In few words, it provides the ability to connect these disparate heterogeneous systems (entities) together. To provide full system integration, which goes beyond just data connectivity, adapters provide wire-level connectivity, and message transformation used for data. A robust Orchestration engine enables complex events and process workloads to be handled. BizTalk also provides the ability to expose and consume services, monitor the end-to-end process flow (providing visibility into the process), and since 2006, the 2006 R2 release has introduced RFID connectivity. Entities may be a device (in the case of RFID), a system within the same department, organization...