Biztalk Server Roadmap

BizTalk Server 2009 represents the next release in Microsoft’s long-term strategy to enable the connected enterprise. Microsoft has invested thousands of development years to create one of the most productive infrastructures for enterprise connectivity and integration on the market: Microsoft BizTalk Server. What used to take customers months and years to design and implement now takes days and weeks. But customers are building increasingly complex composite applications, and Microsoft believes that we can go much farther to help them by further improving the tools and better integrating the developer and information worker environments. BizTalk Server 2009 builds on the existing integration capabilities, which make it easier and less expensive to connect systems within an organization as well as those of partners and customers. Used in conjunction with other components of our “Real World SOA” application platform (e.g., Windows Server, .NET, Visual Studio, SQL Server, and SharePoint) BizTalk Server allows service -oriented applications to connect and interoperate to a wide range of highly heterogeneous systems, including LOB systems, legacy systems, smart devices, and trading partners.

Today, more than 8,000 global customers (83 percent of the Global 2000) have bet their business on BizTalk Server, many for mission-critical workloads. By lowering the cost and complexity of seamlessly integrating disparate systems, BizTalk Server provides the same class of infrastructure to a broad set of customers.BizTalk Server 2009 enhances enterprise connectivity with broad industry support of WS* protocols, the edge via Microsoft BizTalk RFID, and business partners though EDI.

Where We Were

BizTalk Server 2004
With BizTalk Server 2004, the third generation of Microsoft's business process management server, customers gained the benefits of integration with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft Office System. BizTalk Server 2004 enhanced the existing business process orchestration functionality and introduced new capabilities for business activity monitoring (BAM). BizTalk Server 2004 also enhanced application and technology integration with an extended set of adapters, improved business to business (B2B) capabilities including trading partner management, a highly scalable rules engine, and a rich foundation based on the .NET Framework, for building service-oriented applications via rich Web services support.

 

BizTalk Server 2006
BizTalk Server 2006 offered significant improvements in key aspects of connecting applications and businesses, business process automation and management, and service oriented architecture. A new management console provided a single view for managing, monitoring, and deploying BizTalk servers. There were also enhancements to application-level management and improvements to the engine and infrastructure on which the applications ran. Business users were offered extended BAM capabilities such as real-time alerting and notifications, and enhanced integration with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Additionally, more than 23 technology and application adapters were included with BizTalk Server 2006 (at no additional charge) to help customers integrate existing assets within their service oriented architecture. To learn more about the technology and application adapters included with BizTalk Server 2006, see the Microsoft BizTalk Server Adapters page.BizTalk Server 2006 supported 64-bit architecture and the latest versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio, Microsoft Virtual Server, and the .NET Framework.BizTalk Server 2006 also ensured a seamless upgrade from BizTalk Server 2004 without the need to rewrite applications.

Where We Are Now

BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services Enhanced support for messaging based on Web services BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides seven adapters and wizards that enable easy communication to and from BizTalk Server and Web services-based applications via the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Updated SharePoint Server Integration
Pre-built integration between BizTalk Server and SharePoint Server has been updated to provide support for the latest Office release, the 2007 Microsoft Office system

Expanded Business Activity Monitoring
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 expands BAM functionality with interceptors for both WCF and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This enables easy management of aggregations, alerts, and profiles of non-BizTalk Server applications, including those that constitute a key component of an end-to-end business process. By using these new BAM interceptors, customers are able to define and track key performance indicators throughout their business process.

BizTalk Adapter Pack
Additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters, where three new adapters (SAP, Oracle DB, and Siebel) have been rewritten based on the new WCF Adapter SDK. This enables easier connectivity to line of business data from SharePoint Server, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Business Intelligence technologies.

WCF Adapter SDK
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 includes new extensions to the Windows Communication Foundation that make it easier to write WCF-based transports to expose existing technologies and applications. This provides for a simplified programming model on top of the WCF Channel Framework by adding metadata browsing, searching and retrieval functionality, and development tools for generating and testing adapter code.

BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 streamlines the complex task of modernization by providing native integration of IBM midrange and mainframe applications. This helps customers connect applications, data sources, messaging, and security systems between IBM mainframe and midrange systems and Microsoft Windows environments.

Enterprise Service Bus Guidance
Microsoft delivers new prescriptive guidance and pre-built reference architectures for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) functionality – using BizTalk Server and WCF to simplify and accelerate the development of service-oriented architectures.

Enhanced Partner Solutions
Through the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA), Microsoft provides support for a powerful set of end-to-end tools for automating and optimizing business processes. This includes partner solutions for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 in the areas of business process modeling and analysis, business rules management, human-centric workflow, and process simulation. For more information, see the Microsoft Business Process Alliance page.

Business to Business Integration
Integrated Support for EDI and AS2 Protocols BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides more data exchange options including a native engine that provides integrated support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) data (including both X12 and EDIFACT support) and Availability Statement 2 (AS2) data for EDI over the Internet. There are also additional enhancements to B2B accelerators for HIPAA, HL7, SWIFT, and RosettaNet.

Comprehensive RFID Platform Infrastructure
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 provides a device abstraction layer and management tools for connecting to Radio Frequency ID (RFID) devices. These include a complex event-processing layer for applying filters, alerts and transforms to RFID events, support for design, runtime, and management APIs, and back-office integration to major LOB applications and technology platforms.

Other Enhancements
Broader Enterprise Single Sign-OnBizTalk Server 2006 R2 builds on the Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities by adding a management agent for Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) and an MMC snap-in for easier remote management of SSO servers.

Easier updates – BizTalk Server 2006 R2 includes support for Microsoft UpdateThis service from Microsoft provides integrated product updates for Windows and other Microsoft products including BizTalk Server 2006 R2.

Where We Are Going

BizTalk Server 2009
The next version of BizTalk Server continues to build on the investments made to address the concerns of service oriented architecture and enterprise connectivity.

Updated Platform Support
New Application Platform Support BizTalk Server 2009 supports the latest Microsoft platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. These platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, and many advances in the latest developer tools.

New Hyper-V Virtualization Support
BizTalk Server 2009 now takes advantage of the latest virtualization improvements included as part of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.

Improved Failover Clustering
By taking advantage of Windows Server 2008 clustering, BizTalk Server is now able to be deployed in multi-site cluster scenarios, where cluster nodes could reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs.

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services
New Web Services Registry BizTalk Server 2009 includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API.

New Line of Business Adapters
BizTalk Server 2009 provides two new adapters for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server, plus additional improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters.

Enhanced Host Systems Integration
BizTalk Server 2009 adds a new WCF WebSphere MQ channel by providing the transport, data formatter and encoder to integrate directly with WebSphere MQ via WCF and a new WCF Service for Host Applications has been added to expose the traditional Transaction Integrator to .NET Framework developers. Additionally, BizTalk Server 2009 includes updated platform support for the most recent versions of CICS, IMS, CICS HTTP transport, DB2, DB2/400, DB2 Universal Database, and WebSphere MQ.

Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring
By expanding the out of the box BAM functionality with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations which enhances support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Enhanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Guidance
ESB Guidance 2.0 delivers updated prescriptive guidance for applying ESB usage patterns, improved itinerary processing, itinerary modeling using a visual Domain Specific Language (DSL) tools approach, a pluggable resolver-adapter pack, and an enhanced ESB management portal.

Business to Business Integration
Enhanced Support for EDI and AS2 Protocols BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for multiple message attachments, configurable auto message resend, end-to-end filename preservation, improved reporting to address new features, and Drummond re-certification for AS2.

Updated SWIFT Support
By building on a rich SWIFT foundation, BizTalk Server 2009 updates all message schemas and business rules for compliance with SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification, as a result adds support for SWIFT FIN Flat File message types and business rules, BIC Plus IBAN interface, and Extensibility to support SEPA Routing.

Device Connectivity
New Mobile RFID Platform and device management BizTalk Server 2009 delivers a new lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile includes support for enhanced device management, Powershell support for administration of edge infrastructures and the ability to monitor RFID infrastructure using

System Center Operations Manager 2007.

New RFID industry standards support Support for key industry standards (including LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support).

Developer and Team Productivity
New Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) supportBizTalk Server 2009 provides support for Team Foundation Server (TFS), and allows development teams to be able to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.

Enhanced Developer Productivity
BizTalk Server 2009 introduces a number of improvements have been made to the underlying Visual Studio based BizTalk project system which enhances debugging support for artifacts such as BizTalk Maps (XSLT), pipeline components and XLANG Orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing via Visual Studio Test.

Other Enhancements
Messaging BizTalk Server 2009 improves recoverable interchange processing of validation failures by providing support for recoverable interchange processing for disassembly (DASM) and a validation stage within the pipeline. The WCF Adapter has been enhanced  to provide support for configurable transactions and the ability to choose the transaction isolation level in the WCF-Custom Send Adapter.

Administration
By continuing to build on the improvements to the BizTalk Management Console made in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, two new query types have been added for tracked message events and tracked service events which consolidates all queries – tracked/archived data, live data and specialized EDI reports, into a single tool.

Beyond BizTalk Server 2009
We know that our enterprise customers need to make longer-term plans about their infrastructure investments, often 5+ years into the future. In response to this we are providing customers with a general outline for BizTalk Server roadmap themes and affirming our commitment to maintain our traditional rhythm of BizTalk Server releases (roughly every 2 years, or more frequently). The future releases following BizTalk Server 2009 will address the following priorities:

Developer productivity enhancements (e.g. complex mapping);

Enhanced B2B support (e.g. complex trading partner management, expanded industry standards and schemas);

Low-latency messaging enhancements and ESB Guidance;

Enhanced support for cross-enterprise asset tracking, enterprise manageability of devices, and key industry standards;

Real-time business event visibility through BI / BAM Enhancements; and Integration with the latest new platform capabilities (to take advantage of the latest advances in the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and Windows Server).

 

Original Source：http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx