Beta Release of BizTalk 2013

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Keeping up with the promise made during the TechEd Conference this year, BizTalk team did Beta release of BizTalk 2013. As you may have noticed, the name was changed from BizTalk 2010R2 to BizTalk 2013. In addition to latest platform support, this version comes with some great features especially in form of new adapters for both cloud and on-premise integration. Personally, I am happy to see SFTP adapter in the list of new adapters. Till now, I have been using third party adapter from nsoftware to get this functionality but not anymore.  Another feature that caught my eye was the dependency feature. This feature visualizes the various dependencies that exist between ports, maps, orchestrations and pipelines.

I am not going to go through the entire feature set of this release, but will try to create a different context as far as the strategic direction of BizTalk.  BizTalk core is unchanged since 2004 release and that tells a story that BizTalk is a very stable product. This is a key requirement for any enterprise wise product. It gives a certain degree of comfort to customers.  Moving forward, we are going to see smoother integration between cloud and on-premise.  We are going to see better support for REST protocol. At some point, I hope to see even better visualization of message flow within the BizTalk environment.

What do you think of the beta release of BizTalk 2013? Do you think these advancements will alter the work BizTalk consultants are doing? Let us know in the comment section below.

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