So how much EPCGlobal compatible is BizTalk 2009 after all?

Well, not totally I’m afraid. BizTalk 2009’s compatibility is limited to the following:

• LLRP – Low Level Reading Protocol
• TDT library
• EPCIS domain model – and helpers to get them from an event handler

What does this means? The LLRP support tries to guarantee that the hardware remains BizTalk RFID agnostic. The EPCIS domain models means we can get event readings into a compatible object model and do whatever we want with it. So what are we lacking?

For starters, we don’t have ALE. So we’ll have to live with the event handler’s pipeline.

Following up the EPCGlobal stack we don’t have a capture application surface. Though capturing applications are by definition custom made, on an EPCGlobal infrastructure we get for free the repository, repository persistence and subscribing events.

Finally, we lack the EPCIS query interface itself. Oh well, so much for the core of EPCGlobal compatibility...

The good news is that most of this infrastructure that is lacking is really simple to implement over WCF. All but the ALE engine itself, on most cases over BizTalk RFID we will have to live with the event handler pipeline.

Here are a couple of post about aligning BizTalk with EPCIS:

• EPCIS support in BizTalk RFID 2009 - Part 1
• Sample EPCIS Capture Service