BizTalk360 v10 migration

Current BizTalk360 to v10.0 – Migration and New Features

Published on : May 27, 2021

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Christhini

Author

Introduction

For more than a year, the BizTalk360 team has worked on designing, development, and testing of BizTalk360 v10.0 to make our users work efficiently with our product. BizTalk360 exists for around 10 years. In our journey, we have been engaging with new customers through demonstrations, client relationship calls, partner calls, webinars, and many other occasions as well.

Our team has started organizing webinars every month since 2020. Our most recent webinars mainly focused on BizTalk360 v10.0. During the webinar in March our CEO Saravana Kumar showcased the UI interface and a set of features that have been developed in version 10.0 We have received great response from the audience about the product and there were few questions raised like:

  • How can we upgrade to v10.0?
  • Show us in detail about the set of new features
  • Will there be any data loss while migration, etc

To answer these questions and to show the live migration, our team has decided to run a webinar that focussed on these topics. The agenda of the webinar looked like below.

Webinar agenda

As we considered the content that was discussed during the webinar valuable for not just the attendees in the webinar, we have cherry-picked few topics of that webinar and decided to write this blog. We will also highlight a couple of the most interesting features that we discussed during the webinar. If you would like to view the actual recording of the webinar or join us on an upcoming webinar, you can check the website.

Browsers supported for V10.0

After migration following browsers are supported for V10.0

  • Google Chrome (91.0.4472.106 and later)
  • Firefox (88.0.1 and later)
  • Microsoft Edge (Not compatible to 9,10,11)

Migration from an earlier version to v10.0

Although there are many changes in the User Interface, a new prerequisite has been added, you can perform a regular upgrade, just as what you were used to do with earlier versions of BizTalk360. Performing the upgrade takes about 5 to 10 minutes and definitely, there will not be any data loss after the migration.

To be able to install BizTalk360 v10.0, the following prerequisites should be enabled in your environment.

BizTalk360 v10 migration

Note: Run the MSI from a command prompt with administrator access

BizTalk360 will automatically check for the following preceding prerequisites and once all conditions are met, it will take you to the next step. BizTalk360 v10.0 has upgraded from knockout JS to Angular, and users must have installed URL Rewrite extension in the environment.

Once the environment has been upgraded, the BizTalk360 Landing page looks like this

BizTalk360 Landing page

From the landing page, users can see the environments configured in a card view layout. You will have access to details like:

  • BizTalk topology
  • Activating license
  • Number of alarms configured and their status
  • Count of artifacts left for mapping
  • Number of BizTalk servers configured
  • Number of Host Instances

This card layout depicts the information about the environments configured, and the cards can be dragged and dropped based upon the user’s convenience.

Feature Regrouping

One of the main goals of v10.0 is to make BizTalk360 an even more user-centric application. To make it even more customizable for users, we have categorized the operations section in BizTalk360it as listed here:

  • BizTalk Services
  • Advanced services
  • Azure Services
  • Manage Infrastructure

Deep look into Current version vs 10.0   

As you can see in the below screenshot where in earlier version (v9.1), menus were categorized differently, but in v10.0, we have regrouped all features into specific categories. That should make it easier for customers to find their way throughout the product.

Comparison

Under BizTalk Services, you find all the BizTalk Server-related tools for operational management:

  • Applications
  • Search artifacts
  • Message Box Queries
  • Tracking Queries
  • EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)
  • ESB Portal
  • Business Rules Composer
  • Business Activity Monitoring
  • BizTalk Health Monitor
  • Tracking Manager

Under Advanced Services, you find:

  • Secure SQL Queries
  • Advanced event viewer
  • Backup/ DR visualizer

Under Azure Services:

  • Logic apps

Manage infrastructure  

Settings – Environment settings

The settings which are mostly related to environments are categorized into Environment settings. Functionalities wise it is the same, but the menus have been changed. To investigate environment settings, select an environment from the landing page and select Environment Settings.

Environment settings

Under Environment settings you find:

General

  • To Do List
    • Once BizTalk360 installed, users can continue with setting up BizTalk360. Click here to know more!
  • Import/Export
    • BizTalk360 has the capability to import and export the configuration between environments. Users can export/ import for features in BizTalk360Advanced Event Viewer
  • Advanced Event Viewer
  • Azure Subscription
    • If you want to monitor your Azure services like Logic apps Azure service bus queue and API apps. Then subscription details should be provided in environmental level.
  • Manage SQL Server
    • It is important to know about the physical infrastructure of your environment like CPU, SQL server etc are running smoothly in your environment. Based on the tiers you can add and manage your SQL servers.
  • ESB Portal
    • With BizTalk Server, the ESB toolkit can be installed. BizTalk360 has an in- built portal to show and action ESB Exceptions

Monitoring

Analytics

BizTalk360 allows users to enable performance data collection and Tracking data collection for various server types such as IIS, BizTalk, SQL and Windows

Governance and Audit

With the help of BizTalk360, users can capture the activities that are done in both BizTalk and BizTalk360 activities

Settings – General settings

The menus and configurations which are related global and mainly focused on BizTalk360 are categorized as general settings. To investigate General settings navigate to Settings section from the Home Page.

General settings

Under General settings you find:

  • License
    • Here users can activate/ deactivate / extending from trial to commercial, those activities can be managed via licensing section 
  • System settings
    • Users can set up data access settings, date/time settings, cache settings, and how to enable Live feed globally under Global Settings.  
  • Gateway settings
  • Manage dependencies
    • The BizTalk360 Reports functionality requires certain dependency files for users to be able to download PDF reports and/or trigger email notifications to the senior management about the health of the BizTalk Server environment. You can configure these dependencies by copying the dependency file into the Web/Dependencies folder under your BizTalk360 installation. 
  • BizTalk360 Health
    • With BizTalk360 Health, collects and stores multiple types of data using data purging
    • Manage your Windows NT Services  contain the sub-services that are responsible for performing the individual operations. There might be a situation where the sub-services might get into a problem which may result in exceptions. The Manage Services section shows the details of any exception in the services running thus checking for the health of the services. 
  • Notifications channels
    • With BizTalk360, alerts can be triggered using via SMTP option.
  • Team Management
    • In earlier version, User access policies menu has been rephrased to Team management, but functionality wise its same as the previous version 
  • APM Integration
    • Analytical data collected by BizTalk360 Analytics service can be pushed to the below integrated APM such as AppDynamics, New Relic and DynaTrace. 
  • Custom development
    • With the help of custom widgets and API documentation, tasks can be handled easier.

Knowledge Base

Similar to v9, you can create and manage articles globally and tag articles i.e., you can create a KB article that should be visible only to a specific environment and condition.

In addition to that, we have enhanced the feature where you can create and manage KB articles much more efficiently.

Knowledge Base

BizTalk360 has a powerful integrated Knowledge Base which allows to associating Knowledge Base articles for example specific suspended instances. From the BizTalk360 Knowledge Base, you can even link to an internal Wiki or Share Point site in your organization. So, the BizTalk360 Knowledge Base provides you with the help you need at the time you need it.

Resources from BizTalk360

To help our customers, we have recently finished writing a 100+ pages whitepaper. The purpose of that paper is to provide guidance and different insights on how customers can use BizTalk360. You can download the paper from the Resource section on the BizTalk360 website.

Resources from BizTalk360

More resources you can benefit from BizTalk360 are shown below

More resources

Conclusion

We have given a summary of a couple of the highlighted features that have been discussed during the April 2021 webinar. Hopefully, we made it clear how we have improved UI/UX across the board. We are always happy to discuss any challenges you might face, so feel free to reach out to us and have an obligation-free conversation. You can request a demo, or take a free trial.