the notion of biexactness for groups was introduced by ozawa in 2004 and has since become a major tool used for studying solidity of von neumann algebras. in joint work with changying ding, we extended this notion from the group theory setting to the setting of von neumann algebras, thereby giving a unified setting for proving solidity type results. we will discuss biexactness and solidity and give examples of solid von neumann algebras that are not biexact.