OK, so here's a confession - I've always been a huge fan of BizTalk. I remember back in the day (that's last century to you, young fella) when James Utzschneider and his team came up with the BizTalk name, the library and community. But let's face facts, when BizTalk Server 2000 came out, it was still a great idea (using XML and derivatives as the core to your central messaging hub for EAI and B2B) but lacked the ‘complete engineering’ required for you to bet your business on it (things like monitoring, staging and performance tuning were, um, 'challenging'). Since then we’ve improved it with BTS 2000, then 2002, 2004 (which was the “bet your business on this” release) then 2006 and today we’re at BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and now it’s a magnificent beautiful beast of a product.

(Incidentally, if you’re using BizTalk as the central pillar of your SOA strategy, then you’ll want to take a look at our ESB Guidance, here.)

It is a big beast though – for a couple of reasons. The main one is actually business politics. Because it’s a central messaging hub, it’s really an infrastructure sell and there aren’t many people in organisations that understand both the technical and business significance of that. Getting both the Enterprise Architects as well as the General Managers to invest in such infrastructure can be interesting. The second reason for BizTalk being a “big beast” is that, because it’s a central messaging hub, it touches so many systems. And while we try (!) to have well defined interfaces into all these systems, it often takes a knowledge of those systems to get the end-to-end business process flowing smoothly. So, that’s a big chunk of technical knowledge required – outside the knowledge of BizTalk.

The answer for a successful BizTalk implementation appears to involve the following:

-       Executive buy in and support – after all BizTalk is going to span many groups both internal and external to your organisation. It’s going to have a big impact on how you do business.

-       An “integration” centre of excellence run by passionate and committed people

-       Great core infrastructure optimization (ie a metric driven IT department that keeps the lights on and is always looking for ways to improve)

Fortunately, things are getting easier. We've now got some great BizTalk partners here in Australia (Avanade, Breeze, Data#3, DataCogs, Oakton, Stargate to name a few). Additionally, the folks in Redmond have produced some great “how to” manuals that you can download. In particular, I’d highlight the Operations Guide and Performance Guide. You can get the full list here.

BizTalk just gets better – and if you look at where we’re going with Oslo, you can see it continues to be pretty core to our enterprise development strategy.