I am really excited to see lot of new news around BizTalk in TechEd 2012. I was recently watching the session presented by Sriram and Rajesh on “Application Integration Futures: The Road Map and What's Next on Windows Azure”. It was great session and lot of interesting stuff about the feature updates for BizTalk and Azure integration. I have highlighted them below, definitely customers who haven’t started using Microsoft BizTalk ESB Toolkit should start using them which is going to be part of the core BizTalk product in future release, which is cool…

BizTalk Server feature enhancements

Manageability:

ESB Tool Kit is going to be part of the core BizTalk product and Setup.

Visualize BizTalk artifact dependencies in BizTalk administration console.

HIS administration using configuration files.

Performance:

Improvements in ordered send port scenarios

Improved performance in dynamic send ports and ESB, also to configure BizTalk host handler for dynamic send ports. Right now it runs under default host, which does not enable to scale.

MLLP adapter enhancements and DB2 client transaction load balancing / client bulk insert.

Platform Support:

Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 Server, SQL Server 2012, Office 15 and System Center 2012.

B2B enhancements to support latest industry standards natively.

Connectivity Improvements:

Consume REST service directly in BizTalk

SharePoint integration made easier.

Improvements to SMTP adapter, to add macros for sending same email with different content to different parties.

Connectivity to Azure Service Bus relay, queues and topics.

DB2 client connectivity to SQL Server and SQL Server connectivity to Informix. CICS Http client connectivity to Windows.

Azure:

Use Azure as IaaS/PaaS for BizTalk environment.

Use Azure to provision BizTalk environment for test environment / development. Later move to On-premises or build a Hybrid cloud approach.

Eliminate HW procurement for BizTalk environment for testing / demos / development etc.

Enable to create BizTalk farm easily and remove/add more servers as needed.

EAI Service:

EAI Bridge

• Protocol transformation
• Message Transformation
• Running custom code
• Message Enrichment
• Hybrid Connectivity
  • LOB Applications On-premises
  • Application On-premises

• Connectivity to
  • Applications in the cloud
  • Queues/ Topics
  • Ftp
  • Devices
  • Web Services

Bridge can be customized based on the service needs to provide different capabilities needed as part of the bridge. Look at the sample for EDI bridge for EDI service sample. Also with Tracking enabled through the portal.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh674490

Adapters:

Service Bus Messaging adapter - New adapter added.

WebHttp adapter - For REST services.

NetTcpRelay adapter - New adapter added.

I will start posting more and once I start playing with this…