BizTalk Server is Microsoft’s integration and connectivity server and is one of the most deployed integration servers in the industry. BizTalk Server 2010 was released just over a year ago. Today we are happy to share details on what customers can expect from the next release: BizTalk Server 2010 R2.

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 will focus on three primary themes:

• Platform Support – Supporting new and current server and development platforms
• Improved B2B – Aligning with industry standards and continuing to invest in performance improvements
• Ready for the Cloud – Enabling customers to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing

BizTalk Server 2010 R2 will be delivered approximately 6 months following the release of Windows Server 8. Release timing for Windows Server 8 is yet to be announced and will be disclosed by the Windows Server team in the future.

In addition to the investments we are making in BizTalk Server 2010 R2, we will continue the tradition of providing regular cumulative updates on a quarterly basis. These include updates to comply with Line-Of-Business (LOB) systems, schema changes, accelerator certifications, and bug fixes.

We believe that with this release we continue to deliver a mature, reliable and stable integration server that honors the trust of the thousands of customers who run their mission critical business processes on BizTalk Server.

Below is the detailed view of the features we are releasing:

* Release dates for these products have not been disclosed yet

For additional details on BizTalk Server and purchasing options please contact your local Microsoft Account Manager or visit our website.

The BizTalk Server Team.

The time has come for me to move on from Sun and onto something new
that I had been hoping to do for sometime.  Something smaller in scope
but just as interesting.  Adjoovo is the vehicle for this journey of discovery and future posts from me will be found over at http://adjoovo.com.

In the world of light-weight pluggable ESBs supporting a SOA approach (or EAI, or MoM, …) the richness of the component ecosystem is a very important aspect.  Part of Project OpenESB’s purpose is to provide a standards-based framework onto which components can be fabricated and easily deployed.

Recently Frank implemented a nice page redesign that lists the components and allows you to select different views, such as by contributor, by status, etc.  Nice job Frank

GlassFish ESB milestone 2 arrives.  It now includes Data Mashup capabilities and is feature complete.

Project OpenESB is a community that is intended to derive multiple solutions and components all sharing a single platform based on JBI.  Another example of this is a solution in a sub-project called keychain.  Keychain is an early stage project that attempts to solve the problem of how to provision identities against legacy applications.  Essentially it provides a gateway, built on top of the ESB platform, that exposes an "SPML compliant" provisioning interface which can be accessed by any SPML compliant application or just send an SPML document across HTTP/SOAP.

The gateway will then route this request, suitably transformed, to the legacy application to execute the particular provisioning (create, update, delete of user information) request.  Again, this is an early stage project that is driving the creation of new ESB adaptors and will later drive the evolution of the platform into an "appliance-like" package.  So far, to show the breadth of the potential application of KeyChain, there are early examples of provisioning to RACF, Salesforce.com, and LDAP.

GlassFish ESB milestone 2 arrives.  It now includes Data Mashup capabilities and is feature complete.

Our first milestone for GlassFish ESB is now available. This commercially supported form of our open source community technology has been a regularly requested step for us to make.  We would have done it sooner but had been busy with the major release of our larger Composite Application Suite which shares the same foundation. More on the timeline for our final release and the contents of GlassFish ESB can be found here.

One of our big goals for Project OpenESB is to extend the development domains to which it is applicable.  ESB have traditionally been associated as platforms to support message-oriented-middleware (MoM) and more recently service-oriented architecture (SOA).  SeeBeyond also pioneered bringing very strong EAI capabilities to its’ ESB with ICAN. However the range of application segments keeps expanding with very notable areas of growth in the web-build-out (Web2.0, "web as a platform"), event-processing (EDA), etc.

Some of these new terms try to better define or put a new spin on established ways of doing things, some are more "marketectures" to help highlight key advantages of certain platforms to certain problem domains.  What is true is that many of these new "styles of development" do contain valuable principles and patterns that have broader applicability.  Our goal with Project Open ESB is to create a platform that encompasses as many of these styles as make sense.

We believe that we can more easily achieve this with our modular, micro-kernel architecture based on JBI and being evolved through Project Fuji.  As of today OpenESB supports: MoM, SOA and EAI patterns and in the very near future we will be adding "event-driven-architecture" (EDA) to our platform with our soon to be released IEP service engine component in October’08.  The IEP leverages research from Standford and others on event stream processing techniques and the continuous-query-language (CQL).  If you want to find out more about event processing you might want to read this paper published on JDJ written by Bing and Prabhu who work on the IEP.

One of our big goals for Project OpenESB is to extend the development domains to which it is applicable.  ESB have traditionally been associated as platforms to support message-oriented-middleware (MoM) and more recently service-oriented architecture (SOA).  SeeBeyond also pioneered bringing very strong EAI capabilities to its’ ESB with ICAN. However the range of application segments keeps expanding with very notable areas of growth in the web-build-out (Web2.0, "web as a platform"), event-processing (EDA), etc.

Some of these new terms try to better define or put a new spin on established ways of doing things, some are more "marketectures" to help highlight key advantages of certain platforms to certain problem domains.  What is true is that many of these new "styles of development" do contain valuable principles and patterns that have broader applicability.  Our goal with Project Open ESB is to create a platform that encompasses as many of these styles as make sense.

We believe that we can more easily achieve this with our modular, micro-kernel architecture based on JBI and being evolved through Project Fuji.  As of today OpenESB supports: MoM, SOA and EAI patterns and in the very near future we will be adding "event-driven-architecture" (EDA) to our platform with our soon to be released IEP service engine component in October’08.  The IEP leverages research from Standford and others on event stream processing techniques and the continuous-query-language (CQL).  If you want to find out more about event processing you might want to read this paper published on JDJ written by Bing and Prabhu who work on the IEP.

One of the great things about moving all of what we do to a community-based model is that it greatly increases our flexibility and how we can respond to demands in our marketplace.  There are many other benefits but to me the flexibility it provides our customers and us is one of the most important.

One example of increased flexibility is enabling customers to "mix-and-match" product components supplied in commercial software suites with incubating components within open source.  Communities also leverage each other driving by the needs within those communities.  Here is a recent example blending Apache Camel with JBI and Open ESB …