BizTalk Server Applications Integration - Use BizTalk Server 2004 for synchronous request/reply?

Author

Use BizTalk Server 2004 for synchronous request/reply?

Lars Rosenbaum

2004-10-27, 7:46 am

My question is: With BizTalk Server 2004 instead of BizTalk Server2002, are
there new reasons to use BizTalk Server for request/reply messages with
response times in the range of 0 to 5 seconds?

Background:

We are currently moving from BizTalk 2004 to BizTalk 2002.
In our old projects we only used BizTalk 2002 for asynchronous messages.
For synchronous request / reply messages we used plain .Net
We didn´t find any good reasons for using BizTalk 2002 for this,
as we:
1) Only have integration with internally controlled systems (some remote)
2) Usually not file based messages, instead calling APIs via AIC
components and/or Web Services
3) No mappings between message types

Are there new useful reasons in BizTalk 2004 and/or something we missed
already in BizTalk 2002?