What is BizTalk and why should you care (Part 2 of n)
In the first post of this series (get it here if you haven't already) we started exploring what this product, that is often misunderstood, called BizTalk is all about, but before we dive to deeply into the product and start exploring all it's bits and pieces let's go right back to the beginning ...
"Let's start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start ... " 
To really understand BizTalk as a newbie, and sometimes as a seasoned pro it helps to look at it from a simplistic point of view.
So ...
How would you explain BizTalk to your Grandma?
Why your grandma? Well it need not be her ... just pick somebody you know that seems to suffer grasping simple technical concepts, like how to operate a mouse without causing whiplash. If you can explain a complex technical product to somebody like that in such a way that they understand the purpose of the product, then anybody, even regular developers, sales people and business champions and grasp it.
I stumbled on an article posted on codeproject some time back that sums it up perfectly ...
http://www.codeproject.com/biztalk/BiztalkToGrandm...
Wicked; Even I got that! 
So BizTalk is merely (ok over simplification of note ...) a customs facility for the processing of your enterprise messages; whether that is system to system or business to business ... When you want to do messaging with out of the box rules processing, aggregation, tracking, signing and encryption, reliable delivery there is only one place to go (IMHO) and that is to BizTalk Server.
Hope you enjoyed this short post in a contnuing series ...
Next time we will start to delve a little deeper into each of the "core" features of the product.
I hope this series is at least starting to answer the question ...
"What is BizTalk and why should I care"