Should I use orchestration

Question

I am currently in the process of porting an existing application (Biztalk 2004) to a newer version of Biztalk. The current solution takes multiple types of EDI documents, modifies it if its necessary and sends it to our legacy system to be loaded and processed.
This process is developed using a combination of Receive Ports, Pipeline component, Send Ports and Maps, Schema and Message Queue Components. This solution uses 10 send & receive ports to handle various aspects of the process such as Bursting EDI into
individual messages, Transforming Messages, Error handling, Edi Validation and Batching of Edi Messages. All the modification of EDI is done using Message Queue Components.
This solution does NOT use orchestration at all. I am considering implementing the current solution as a Biztalk orchestration. I have read up a bit on orchestrations and worked thru few sample applications. But I am still very confused over what benefit
of using orchestration, if a solution can be developed without it. I am sure I am missing something here. What additional benefit orchestration gives that the current solution does not?

Answer 1

The use of Orchestrations are sort of religious when it comes to BizTalk desgin, so I'm just going to leverage what I think:
The use of Orchestrations is never a goal in itself. They should be used if required. In other words: If your integrations cannot be done through simple Content-Based Routing using Pipelines, Maps, Ports and Subscriptions then you start to look into Orchestrations.
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