The folks at FarPoint Technologies have released their latest product, the FarPoint Spread for BizTalk Server 2006. This is one of the single most important and long awaited innovations to the business process integration (BPI) market I've every seen.
Every day, thousands of Microsoft Excel worksheets are emailed across the world to trading partners, suppliers and customers. Excel has, in many ways, become the default media for sending data back and forth. And every day, someone has to manually open these worksheets and cut and paste the information into other "systems" which need this data. But no more! Now developers can use the FarPoint Spread disassembler pipeline component to extract this data as xml for further processing by BizTalk Server 2006 and any other systems that BizTalk can connect to. This literally opens up thousands and thousands of integration possibilities to BizTalk developers and makes it very simple and easy to get at the data inside an Excel workbook.
I've been using this new component for several months and it's already saved me countless hours of development time, not to mention allowing me to completely automate many manual business processes. I rarely make a "pitch" for non-MSFT development products, but if you're a BizTalk developer like me this is one tool that you really need in your "integration arsenal".
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