Microsoft Corp. on Monday launched new software that will help businesses

At a developer's conference in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled the new product, called BizTalk Server 2000, as well as a $2 billion commitment by the company to train developers in BizTalk and other products. The product comes as Microsoft awaits a federal judge's ruling on an appropriate remedy for the company's violation of U.S. antitrust laws. The U.S. Justice Department has proposed breaking Microsoft into two companies. BizTalk Server is based on XML, or extensible markup language, which is increasingly being used in business Web sites and networks to seamlessly transfer information between different computers and companies. A key feature of BizTalk, which will ship in a test version later this summer, is so-called "Orchestration" technology, one of the fruits of Microsoft's $1.3 billion purchase of Visio Corp. last year. Orchestration will help the different computers involved in a business transaction talk to each other, making it easier to pass data from a server computer to a desktop PC to a handheld device.