Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 Released

Great news, “An important milestone in the Microsoft Enterprise Integration journey“, today Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016. You can read about the official announcement from Frank Weigel (Principal Director, Program Management) here BizTalk Server 2016 RTM BizTalk Server has traveled a long path starting from the year 2000 with a pretty much constant release every 2 years ones. BizTalk Server 2016 is the 10th release of the product ( 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2006R2, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2013R2). In an enterprise software world, very few products would have sustained such a long journey over a 16 years period. BizTalk Server has seen near death scenarios few times, you can search for the term “is biztalk dead” and see the results for yourself, time and time again we had some great conversation on this topic and convinced people BizTalk is not going anywhere. This release also means Microsoft is extending the support for BizTalk Server for another 10 years, the official support cycle duration for Microsoft Enterprise products.

Why should you consider moving to BizTalk Server 2016?

The future of Integration is going to span beyond the on-premise boundaries, organizations will start taking advantage of the SaaS based solutions like Dynamics 365, Salesforce, along with their on-premise footprints like SAP, Oracle etc. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 with its first class support for two-way Azure Logic Apps communication, Azure Service Bus, on-premise Gateway etc makes it a perfect choice. It’s a no brainer to choose Microsoft BizTalk Server 2016 as the preferred middleware solution.

What’s new in BizTalk Server 2016?

Here are some of core new functionalities/features added in BizTalk Server 2016

• Support for newer platforms: As like any other releases, latest version of BizTalk supports latest dependant platforms like Windows Server 2016, SQL Server 2016, and Visual Studio 2015
• SQL Server 2016 AlwaysOn Availability Groups: This is one of the major enhancements when it comes to Backup/DR strategy in BizTalk.
• BizTalk Server Azure VMs in production: Even though BizTalk Server images were available in Azure for a couple of years now, it was used mainly for development/test purposes. However, with BizTalk 2016, Azure BizTalk VM’s are fully supported for production workload.
• Logic App adapter: This is one of the key new adapters that shipped with BizTalk 2016, the one that’s going to bridge the gap between the on-premise and the cloud world. It’s a full two-way adapter, you can send messages from BizTalk to Azure Logic Apps and receive the messages from Azure Logic Apps to BizTalk Server via Azure Gateway.

There are few more improvements in the product like enhanced FTP, SFTP, SAP, MLLP adapters, import export tracking/parties, few BizTalk Admin console improvements, etc you can see the full list here.

Important Deprecations

If you are planning to migrate to BizTalk Server 2016, you need to take care of certain deprecated features, mainly the following ones

• SOAP adapter is one of most widely used adapter in BizTalk Server, it’s fully deprecated now and you should start using WCF- BasicHttp adapter
• Native SQL Adapter is been deprecated, you need to start using WCF-SQL Adapter.

BizTalk360 Support for BizTalk Server 2016

I’m also happy to announce the latest version of BizTalk360 (version 8.1) we released beginning of this month supports BizTalk Server 2016 RTM. We have been working closely with Microsoft Product Group and some of the early BizTalk Server 2016 TAP (technology adoption program) customers to support BizTalk Server 2016. I just wanted to give you a quick head-ups, we are super excited about BizTalk Server and it’s future. You can watch the video presented by Jon Fancey at INTEGRATE 2016 showcasing some of the new features in BizTalk Server 2016 BizTalk Server 2016 video at INTEGRATE 2016