Microsoft Corp. announced the public availability of the beta version of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. A member of the .NET Enterprise Server family of products, BizTalk Server 2000 will unite, in a single product EAI, B2B integration and the BizTalk Orchestration technology to allow developers, IT professionals and business analysts to easily build dynamic business processes that span applications, platforms and businesses over the Internet. BizTalk Orchestration technology builds on the Visio diagramming platform for building dynamic, distributed business processes, and an advanced orchestration engine for executing and managing those processes. BizTalk Server 2000 supports a multitude of transports and protocols in addition to XML, including EDI (X12 and UN EDIFACT), HTTP, HTTPS, Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ), SMTP (e-mail), and flat file transfer. BizTalk Server 2000 also supports industry-standard security technologies such as public key encryption and digital signatures to ensure secure document exchange with trading partners, and XLANG, an XML-based language for describing business processes. The beta version of BizTalk Server 2000 is available immediately for download at www.microsoft.com/biztalkserver