Up to speed with 2005: Biztalk 2004

Given my previous experience (teaching object orientation and architecture to business developers and custom vertical business applications mostly for internal comsuption) you would understand my lack of knowledge (and interest :-( ) in technologies like Biztalk. But even in my area of expertise, I increasingly see the need for integration and I also see the increasing complexity of the need. Even a few months ago, I would have said "go with web services, that will be enough" but inter-company information exchange (aka B2B) is becoming more and more sophiscated so, in several scenarios, using just web services is viable but it will take too much hand work, thus my growing interest in products like Biztalk. Besides, with Biztalk 2004 abilities' like Visual Studio IDE integration, Biztalk is coming to my turf instead of the other way around. As for fresh information from this event, to the question "what are the plans on Biztalk given the .NET 2005 wave?" the answer was "we will certainly integrate with Sql Server 2005 and do some adjustments but, aside of that, Biztalk 2005 will basically be Biztalk 2004". Now back to the business workflow Erik Leaseburg is showing inside Visual Studio.