Content Based Routing: EAI Challenge, what’s the best solution Part II

At a conceptual level CBR exists as a design pattern which can be implemented with several message brokers. BizTalk 2006 (and 2004 as well) is one of those brokers, so if you should choose for CBR and your customer already has BTS 2006, they won’t need another product.

The solution you choose depends (amongst others) on how fast the data needs to available at the target system. The advantage of CBR is that (off course) you don’t need an orchestration. So at run-time no instance needs to be created and no data needs to be persisted along the way, giving you a better performance than a solution with an orchestration. So far small packages of data which need to be delivered quickly, CBR should do the job fine. Where needed, you can use SSO for authentication and when the same data must be send to several parties, you can use a Send Port Group, to keep routing simple. The latter works from an orchestration as well off course.
Another disadvantage when using an orchestration is that although you can create dynamic ports, the ‘dynamic’ part is sender-related, not protocol-related. So, depending on the protocol of the target system you will need multiple logical ports in your orchestration, which will be bound to multiple physical protocol ports. This leaves you with a more complex solution than you probably would be necessary.

Resuming: I would use CBR for your solution. Page 256 of the book you mentioned, contains a list of when (not) to choose for a solution with an orchestration.