BizTalk Server 2013 BETA

Copied from Saravana Kumar’s blog on BizTalk360 Blog

 

This must put an end to the debate going on for the past two years "BizTalk is Dead". Both as a consultant in the past and founder of BizTalk360 I meet lot of customers who invested heavily on BizTalk server. For the past couple of years with the innovation going on in the cloud space, some of them got the impression Microsoft is moving toward the cloud and BizTalk is dead.This statement is not true, we been working with some of the top executives in the BizTalk product team and they themselves are sometimes puzzled how this message got into the market.

Keeping that message aside, it’s very clear from the commitment made by Microsoft to deliver one major release roughly every 2 years. They kept the promise going from 2000 (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009, 2010 and now 2013), not sure what else you can ask for from a product vendor. BizTalk Server 2013 is not just a platform alignment, there are big investments in various areas of the product.

Core Features

• Integration with Cloud Services – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta includes new out-of-the box adapters to send and receive messages from Windows Azure Service Bus. It also provides capabilities to transfer messages using different relay endpoints hosted on Azure.
• RESTful services – REST adapter that comes out of the box helps to both consume and expose restful services. We have couple of posts explaining this topic from the CTP releases REST (WCF-WebHttp) adapter in BizTalk Server 2010 R2 , Consuming JSON endpoint with BizTalk 2010 R2 REST WCF-WebHttp adapter
• Enhanced SharePoint adapter – Integrating with SharePoint using BizTalk Server 2013 Beta is now as simple as integrating with a file share. We have removed the need for dependency on SharePoint farms, while still providing backward compatibility.
• SFTP adapter – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta enables sending and receiving messages from an SFTP server.
• ESB Toolkit integration – With BizTalk Server 2013 Beta, ESB Toolkit is now fully integrated with BizTalk Server. Also, the ESB Toolkit configuration experience is vastly simplified to enable a quick setup.
• Dependency tracking – The dependencies between artifacts can now be viewed and navigated in Admin console.
• Improvements in dynamic send ports – BizTalk Server 2013 Beta provides the ability to set host handler per adapter, instead of always using the default send handler of the adapters.

Note: The above snippet is more or less from the download page.

Read the full article here

BizTalk Server 2013 Beta is available for download https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35553