Using the Biztalk Sharepoint Adapter
Biztalk 2006 ships with an out of the box adapter that can talk to Sharepoint Services. The only serves two purposes - posting messages (documents) to Sharepoint as part of an orchestration, or receiving messages (documents) into an orchestration from Sharepoint when they've been added. Using it, you can subscribe to changes in document libraries on Sharepoint, and run a workflow accordingly.
But how do you get the adapter to work? Last week I discovered just how tricky it is. I really like a comment that I heard last week from one of my co-workers in my current engagement. Biztalk has come a long way over it's three versions, and the core is getting to be pretty rock solid; but all those bits on the outside that hang off it are still pretty flaky. That sums it up perfectly :)
The adapter is available to you the moment you've installed Biztalk. In fact, the Sharepoint adapter is really just a webservice adapter that knows how to talk to a specific Sharepoint web service. Which web service though? Ahh...
The web service also ships with Biztalk, but it doesn't get installed by default. You can install it on any box that's running WSS, but you have to run the Biztalk installer to it (it's under 'Additional Software') - flaky problem number one :) For development, you've generally got Biztalk and WSS installed on the same dev box, so make sure you install WSS first - you can't install the web service unless WSS has already been installed.
So you tell it to install and it gets placed within it's own virtual directory within your share point website. Apparently (and this was only found thanks to Bill Chesnut) you also have to BAS (Business Activity Services) for it to work - and the installer doesn't enforce this requirement - flaky problem number two.
Things still aren't done yet - there's a whole lot of specific steps you need to follow to get it working. The most important being setting up some users and groups both within AD, and within the WSS site itself. Follow the install instructions to the letter, and things will most likely work.
We had some extra issues since the WSS instance was installed on a non-default port. When configuring the send/receive port in Biztalk, the option you're after is the 'Web Service Port'. We completely overlooked that setting - once we realised that talking to Sharepoint was failing because it was trying to use port 80, we hunted through the configs looking to set the entire new URL to the webservice, not just the port number.
At the end of the day once you've got it all working, it works pretty well. Just remember that that's all you can do - get and set documents. If you need to do anything else with Sharepoint, then you need to use some other mechanism. It ends up that we do - we need to create sites and users on the fly, so we've written a web service that uses the WSS api to do it all for us, but if you only need the limited functionality, then the Sharepoint Adapter is the way to go.
Why am I talking about Biztalk? In my current engagement we need to do a lot of Biztalk work, so it's on my mind a lot at the moment. I actually like Biztalk a lot - it's amazing just how much it can do without writing any/much code. In fact, I'm starting to get code withdrawals :)
The most confusing part is ports. Everything in and out of Biztalk goes via a port. These are not to be confused with the ports that I'm used to - port 80 for web, etc. They really should have used a different name.
WSS 3.0 has just RTMd - I wonder if the adapter can talk to it? I bet not!
Biztalk is good, the documentation not so good (in places), but overall it seems to be pretty cool.