Biztalk R2 is nearing release and with support of RFID being delivered it will open a new area for biztalk apps altogether. I am excited about RFID as a technology though the technology is under fire including boycott by many activist group . Some of the concerns regarding privacy are valid but the potential of the technology is amazing. RFID or Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a data collection system based on tiny microchips attached to a box, pallet or individual item that communicate with other devices using radio waves. The RFID readers obtain data from the tags ( even write ) in bulk. Your RFID client software then collects , ortganizes and distributes this data . The tags can be active or passive meaning ones that are activated by sedning a signal or active which continously screams out its existence .
The benefits of RFID over existing technologies like Barcoding are many including more data capacity , do not need line of sight , bulk read , automated reading ,counting and life history of the objects using read/write tags
The applications are tremendous end to end visibility from factory to consumer , medicines, international shipments , animal tracking . From the Biztallk perspective we have an RFID Services running on the client platform with an RFID client on WCF (possibly ) shipping out of the bax whihc biztalk can leverage. Since this would be on WCF you should be able to consume this with not biztalk applications also .
The Event processing layer which hosts the Biztalk rules engine in some format will support things like eliminating duplicate reads , aggregation events or some custom threshhold rules.
I will be posting soon about Biztalk RFID soon . Meanwhile you can visit the RFID resource centre
