A few days ago I attended the Oporto BizTalk Innovation Day with my colleagues Pedro Vala and Tiago Oliveira. Steef-Jan’s session on cloud based adapters was interesting (although part of it was available as an extension to BizTalk Server 2010), and Tord Nordahl’s session on “Proactivity in BizTalk”, which was really focused on the “IT Pro” point of view, was also very interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever met a BizTalk Admin ever before, with many projects done. Another IT-focused talk was done by Saravana, on BizTalk360, and the product – now in version 6.0, is absolutely impressive. With a friendly pricing model (even for local standards), we’ll recommend it on all future and present customers. Check it out!
Akshat Sharma from the product team did a keynote and answered some questioins, where my highlight was when he said that BizTalk 2013 will be on Azure Iaas when IaaS goes live/GA.
Also at this event the local MS people announced the RTM of BizTalk Server 2013, which has already been extensively covered elsewhere (here or here or this post by Saravana is also interesting). My personal highlights are for the now-native Azure Service Bus integration, the new SharePoint adapter using the client object model (I’ve spent hours troubleshooting installation problems with the previous one), and the including (at least!) of the ESB Toolkit in the base install/config. The REST support also gets an honorable mention :).
