BizTalk CTP Changes, and BAM Portal Modifications

I installed the brand new CTP of BizTalk Server on Monday, and was pleased to see a few new things. Four of the new adapters (Oracle DB, Oracle Applications, Siebel, Peoplesoft) were available for installation (via separate process). Documentation looked to be improved as well. Another big thing I noticed (which I swear wasn't there in Beta1) is in the Rules Engine. Now, when you point to an XML file for a fact or vocabulary, it auto populates the FULL name (namespace included). This should eliminate development headaches that occured when the XML "type" didn't match between the Orchestration and the Rule.

Another thing I played with today was the visual modification of my BAM portal. While you cannot open the portal in FrontPage and modify the whole thing (like a standard SharePoint site), you do have access to heading, image, stylesheet, and main page modifications. Just go to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\BAMPortal directory and you'll see the standard stylesheet and images that you can change to your liking. It doesn't look like we're going to make the source code available for the BAM portal moving forward, but, a good CSS wizard can modify the look and feel well enough to fit in with the rest of your internal portals.