BizTalk 2006 Beta1 has been released

Well folks, it’s here … no, not my blog ... BizTalk 2006 Beta1 has been released (see https://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/bts2006beta.mspx ) and soon we should hear the verdict from the customers.

I have been working at Microsoft for the last 5 years (almost), the last 3.5 years as a developer on BizTalk. I was part of the team that shipped BizTalk 2004 and I really liked the product, especially the design and the flexibility that came with it. That being said, BizTalk 2006 is going to be sooooo much better. Microsoft really listens to customers’ feedback and this should be visible in BizTalk 2006. But I’m going to stop here and let you judge it for yourself or otherwise some people will accuse me of propaganda.

This blog will be centered on BizTalk 2006 native adapter for Windows SharePoint Services 2003 (aka WSS v2 or WSS 2003). If you have used WSS 2003 and BizTalk 2004 then you probably have downloaded and tried the GotDotNet WSS adapter (see https://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=0d1aa85c-cf8d-497e-84f4-3ffec8db115f ). AFAIK, the GotDotNet WSS Adapter is made available by Microsoft under a Shared Source License. One caveat here, it is not supported by Microsoft. Now, here comes the good part … a BizTalk native adapter for Windows SharePoint Services will be available with BizTalk 2006, and since it is part of the product it should be also fully supported by Microsoft. I will talk pretty often about both these adapters so in order to make it easier for me, I will use “GotDotNet adapter” or "Shared Source adapter" when referring to the unsupported Shared Source adapter on GotDotNet and “native adapter” or “BizTalk native adapter” when referring to the Windows SharePoint Services 2003 adapter included with BizTalk 2006. Also, instead of “Windows SharePoint Services” I will use WSS.