I've just completed delivering a week of training on the next major version of our integration product, BizTalk Server 2004. As part of the products that I am responsible for in Microsoft, I've had access to early builds of BizTalk Server 2004 for some time, so even though I knew it was an amazing product, this was my first chance for our local partners to get a good look at it first hand. Some already had experience with the previous version, BizTalk Server 2002, and some did not, but it was a wonderful experience to see that no matter what exposure that they had had previously, they all agreed that BizTalk Server 2004 was an amazing product. Some of the positive feedback was:-

  • An amazingly integrated development experience - the BizTalk enhanced IDE really rocks!
  • Integration with the .NET Framework is really powerful
  • The Editor and the Mapper are classy
  • Orchestration is much better, and works as you would think. Much more intuitive. Great checking as you go. Love the Smart tags!
  • Fantastic integration with WSS and InfoPath for business users. Limitless possibilities.

On the other hand, there were also some suggestions for improvements too:-

  • How they wished that the now built in SQL Adapter was a generic data source adapter, compatible with ODBC and OLE-DB data sources. Yep, I agree that'd be awesome.
  • Nice to come up with a wizard to help enlist and deploy ever changing orchestrations during development.

Having lived with this new version for sometime, I'm so re-energized by the excitement generated from our partners on working with the new version for the first time. It's an amazing step forward in our integration vision and I'm as excited as them in being able to share it with our customers.