10 Things to get excited about the BizTalk 2010 R2 CTP

Microsoft officialy announced the CTP of BizTalk server 2010 R2 yesterday.

I am personally excited about this release due to multiple reasons , the first of which I had used the pre-CTP bits on my earlier webcast and I had mentioned some of this would be landing pretty soon.
So I am glad to see that come true and the early access to everyone.

The second thing I am excited about is despite the new version note getttting a new name upgrade and and is relegated to a Release 2 of 2010, there are such huge investments and proming set of tools that is getting added to your arsenal , that it makes  hybrid connectivity scenarios a real first class citizen in the BizTalk middleware platform.

What that means is really intuitive integration with  Windows Azure Service Bus Queues/Topics/Relays.  by the introduction of the  following adapters and Bindings

• SB-Messaging, for sending/pulling data from Service Bus Queues/Topics
• WCF-NetTCPRelay, for hosting relays or sending data to NetTCPRelay end points 
• WCF-BasicHttpRelay, for hosting relays or sending data to BasicHttpRelay end points

The third thing that I am excited is that with this CTP , BizTalk now has native support for ACS authentication and is extensible to other auth mechanisms from other identitiy providers

 

The fourth thing that I am excited is REST support ( frankly this came a little late  considering how prevanlent RESTful services are today. so ability to consume was a no brainer ) So with the new WCF-WebHttp adapter. All the HTTP operations like GET,/PUT/DELETE/POST are now supported natively.

 

The fifth thing that make me excited is ( I will harp on REST a little bit more)  now not only can you consume , you can also expose RESTful Services from BizTalk Server.

 

The sixth thing would be  BizTalk IaaS, I have lived through enough years in my consulting life when I have always felt we are the mercy of procurement in the ability to chamipion innovation. Now that you can spin up your own BizTalk infrastructre in the cloud with a few clicks and a Credit Card suddenly procuring a few servers to load test becomes a snap . It also now becomes a Opex cost rather than a capex cost , that should make some CFO's ad CIO's drool on ability in Azure.

 

Seventh  would be platform updates  Windows 2012 / 2008 R2 , SQL 2012/2008 R2 , VS 2012.

SAP 7.2/Oracle DB 11.2 and Oracle EBS 12.1,

 

Eight  since I  am now a Houtonian after having bougtht  a house here and we are big on Medical  and Health in this town so it is heartening to see more robust  support for HL7 2.5.1 , improvements in the MLLP adapter and a commitment to HL7 2.6 schema update in Beta timeframe .

 

Ninth would be no surprise If you have listened to my talk last week , you would know that I am pretty passinate around EDI in general and how much of a strong case I have made for BizTalk to be your middleware of choice when it comes to implementing EDI solutions that gives you most bang from the buck.  So in that area I am happy to see B2B enhancements to support latest standards natively
 ◦Support for X12 5040, 5050, 6020, 6030
 ◦Support for EDIFACT D06A, D06B, D07A, D07B, D08A, D08B, D09A, D09B, D10A, D10B

  Support for 999

 

 

Last but not the least would be the messaging from Microsoft and the stability of the build ( which I have been playing with for a while ) for which our the Microsoft Product team  should recieved Kudos is . This release has dispelled many myths and conspiracy theories , This takes the BizTalk brading to a much broader messaging and is maximizing the BizTalk brand value to new level which has today 12,000 plus customers and growing and with the new ability to run BizTalk in the cloud make it a commodity that even new companies can innovate on without investing in big iron which has essentially lowered the barriers to innovation. The team has also done a fantastic job of listening to customers and really taken the platform to address all the top concerns from current customers who have made huge bets on the platform. So kudos to the PG Team. 

 

So in that sense I believe BizTalk 2010 R2 which is promsed to land 6 months post Win8  is a new landmark release of BizTalk Server just like waht BizTalk 2004 was , improved and ready  with changes to take it through the next 10 years.

You can read the full announcement here