I will be not the first nor last one that will blog, tweet or share through other social media that BizTalk Server 2013 is RTM. The 8th release in little over twelve years. That is amazing as I do not believe any Server Product has such a release cadence. Impressive as the Microsoft BizTalk Server Product keeps pushing out new features in the product.
There was talk, rumors or bold statements that this product was near its end. Some even pronounced or claimed it was dead. However the product is still alive as Microsoft will keep innovating the on-premise version. Besides on-premise you can run BizTalk in a VM i.e. IaaS solution for development/testing purposes. That is not all as BizTalk Services will follow in the Windows Azure Platform. This will be an enhancement of the previous EAI/EDI labs.
The product group made the following areas:
- Improved Performance
- Simplified Development and Management Experience
- Cloud Connectivity
- Running BizTalk Server in the cloud (IaaS)
- Support for the latest platform and standards
Alignment with the platform & standards is usually done with each new version. Interesting more is simplified experience with dependency viewer in the BizTalk Administration Console, the SFTP adapter, performance gains with MLLP adapter, XslCompiledTransform in Maps, the connectivity to the cloud through WCF-BasicHttpRelay, WCF-NetTcpRelaty, and SB-Messaging. Even more important or interesting is the REST Support through the WCF-WebHttp. This adapter will provide the ability to consume or expose RESTful Endpoints. Finally BizTalk can be run in a VM in Windows Azure.
With this new version you can run your on-premise integration solutions even better, and it will easier to build hybrid solutions that span on-premises and the cloud. I expect that the new on-premise release will follow in two years as we are accustomed to. In the end I believe the product will merge to one service that can be deployed on-premise or leveraged in Windows Azure.
Watch out for upcoming BizTalk articles in the BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki. The following articles are currently present:
- BizTalk Server 2013
- BizTalk Server 2013: New Adapters
- BizTalk Server 2013: Training and tutorial material
- BizTalk Server 2013: Dependencies
- Ninja Steef-Jan (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)