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TechEd USA 2009 wrap up

stevemar — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:13:00 GMT

Friday concluded this year’s TechED: North America. We were delighted to have thousands of developers, IT professionals and technology decision makers in attendance, gaining insights into how to make their applications, infrastructures and businesses more innovative and cost effective. Both continue to be core priorities in today’s economy.

Bill Veghte announced the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate, which includes some great new features for improved web experiences, scalability, hardware utilization and virtualization. We also continued to talk about the recent WebSphere Loves Windows campaign emphasizing significant cost savings, better efficiency and improved performance when customers run Websphere on Windows Server or take advantage of the .NET Framework for application development. Last, we demonstrated ways in which our customers could unlock the hidden potential in their existing technologies today by leveraging current versions of Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and Visual Studio together.

So where do we go from here? Well, whether you’re a developer, an IT Pro or a decision maker within your organization you should be thinking about a few key things. Darryl Taft put it perfectly in this article when he called out the fact that IT can be a competitive differentiator in today’s economy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need new features or technology. Think about harnessing the power that lives within your infrastructure today by taking advantage of tools that make it easier to spin up a new web presence, like the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) . Second, keep your skills fresh by leveraging resources like the Ramp Up program at MSDN. And last but not least, speak up! Engage in community dialogue and as always, tell us what you think!

A Spirited Debate...

stevemar — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:13:00 GMT

As everyone knows, there is no shortage of passion in the tech industry. Naturally, there are many viewpoints out there, which leads to another thing I always enjoy….a spirited debate. Just so happens that I’m having one right here as a result of the recent WebSphere Loves Windows campaign and benchmarking results. I’d like to take the time to thank those of you who have responded or posted on the work to date. Remember, this is all in the name of saving customers money and helping them achieve optimal ROI.

While I rely on Greg to answer some of the technical questions associated with his research, and he’s done so via his blog, I also want to continue to emphasize two points:

· We stand behind the results and the methods used for this testing from end to end. In fact, I recently responded to IBM by offering to pay for independent benchmarking via a third party. I hope to hear back and get that going, yet my phone remains strangely silent.

· Apples to apples comparison? Well, we know that everyone’s apples look a little different, so check out the tool and see for yourself. By doing this you get to run what you deem as the fairest possible comparison and see how it works.

Please keep the feedback coming! We look forward to seeing more results from others as they test new configurations.

The "Benefits" of Singularity... Thoughts on the Events of the Week

stevemar — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:20:00 GMT

Even before the events of early this week, we were fielding questions about a homogenous hardware / software approach. Apple being the obvious example - clearly there is a segment that is willing to pay significantly more for a closed hardware / software experience. The argument is an interesting one and is something that is intriguing at first blush. Having a singular or very limited set of hardware to test against could decrease a variety of expenses such as development and testing. You could even argue acceleration in go to market because there wouldn’t be a handoff between the software side and the hardware side. While you’re basking in additional benefits, let me paint you another picture.

Moments after Jimmy Stewart's character George Bailey cried “I wish I was never born” he found himself in a strange, and far less wonderful life. Pottersville is mostly a slum with a single land owner in town, the residents are disgruntled, all the houses look the same and every dollar earned or spent flows to and from a single entity. Sure, queue up the haters, a Microsoft guy telling everyone what the world looks like with complete vertical consolidation will strike some as odd.

Here’s the reality…There are over 400,000 Microsoft partners worldwide. This diverse ecosystem includes hardware providers of all shapes and sizes, system integrators, ISVs, value-added resellers, hosters, distributors and many, many others. One of my favorite moments over the course of the year is spending time with our partner advisory council where folks from HP to SolidSoft get together and tell us how we can better meet customer needs. Here’s what I know for sure – the innovation we collectively deliver to customers is a reflection of the collective IQ and RD spend across those hundreds of thousands of partners. The strength of our offering and our ability to meet customer needs is predicated on the relationships that we have and the competition that is created from innovation.

What’s my view on the events of the week? No thanks, Mr. Potter. Beyond vertical singularity, I’ll save my thoughts on the future of Java for another day….

Microsoft Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Latest Magic Quadrants for Application Infrastructure

stevemar — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:30:00 GMT

The latest round of research is out from Gartner, and they have positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant of all three Application Infrastructure Magic Quadrants. The Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for SOA Composite Application Projects , Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for New Systematic SOA Application Projects, and the Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Back-End Application Integration Projects.

In my humble opinion, placement in the Leaders Quadrant validates Microsoft as a leading provider of platform technology for service orientation and integration. We believe that these reports highlight the depth of our offering in these spaces and recognize our potential for future innovation.

For more information on today’s news, please click here for details on the press release.

On the legalese:
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
The Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc., as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner report is available upon request from Microsoft Corporation.

Ring in the New Year with the SOA & Business Process Conference – goes great with Eggnog…

stevemar — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:57:00 GMT

We had our first real snow last week which means that ski season is finally upon us and everyone in Seattle must relearn how to drive in slightly awkward conditions (again). This is a great time of year as work tends to slow a bit, winter sports heat up and you can still log plenty of miles on the bike as long as you pay attention to the drivers on the bottom of the learning curve. While 2008 is a year that few are likely to forget, most people are already getting ready for 2009. With the new year coming there is one more thing I am excited about – and that’s the upcoming SOA and Business Process Conference on January 28-29, 2009.

Given the current economic environment, we know that many of our partners and customers are cutting back on travel. Thus, we are trying out a completely different format –we are still holding an event in Redmond (dates mentioned above) though the format will be a new, concentrated, two-day version that will provide our customers and partners with the most relevant information possible. We’re also taking the conference on the road. Some of you have already attended events scattered around the globe. Why are we doing this? First and foremost, a geographically distributed schedule allows us to interact with far more people. Second, making the event itself more specific will maximize time for those who make the investment to come.

During the conference, attendees will see and hear how customers and partners are using real-world SOA to drive business results, and will also have the opportunity to hear from customers and partners who’ve successfully implemented real-world SOA solutions, Microsoft execs and Gartner analyst Nick Gall on maximizing current SOA investments. For those of you who can’t make it out, we’re planning to provide new SOA and BPM content via the web toward the end of February.

Feel free to visit our site to see the full session list and other information. Hope to see you all there.

TechEd Developer 2008

stevemar — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:43:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of being in Barcelona this week for the TechEd Developer conference. Highlights – getting to talk to several hundred developers about WF / WCF / Dublin /Oslo. Lowlights – it’s Barcelona, what could be a lowlight? TechEd capped off the most interesting 8 weeks I’ve ever had in software. In under two months we’ve had major iterations on virtually all the technologies that we drive in CSD. It started out with a roadmap update on BizTalk Server where we provided some more detail on BTS2009 and also talked about the next two major releases.

Next, we announced major updates to WF and WCF and introduced “Dublin”. After that, I hit the road with Robert Wahbe, VP of CSD, our fearless leader. We talked to several RDs and various members of the press about Oslo – and progress we’ve made in the last year. We were getting ready to ship the Oslo CTP and wanted to give folks a sense of how it had developed and what they’d see at PDC.

Two weeks ago at PDC we made good on the promise to provide CTPs on WF, WCF, Dublin, and Oslo (including “M”, “Quadrant” and the Repository). For those scoring at home that’s a promise kept – one year from the Oslo announcement to code. For those of you who didn’t make it to the conference, take a look at Oslo at the new Dev Center or www.modelsremixed.com. Going further, we announced the Azure Services Platform and opened it up to attendees for an early CTP. As a company we’ve spent the last 20 years democratizing the desktop, we’ll spend the next 10 democratizing the cloud.

Last week we kicked off a new “Real World SOA happens {here}” theme. This features a new online video portal that will showcase the successes of our customers around the globe. This update to the web also highlights a set of events that we’re running to broadly connect with thousands of customers worldwide as part of a 20+ city road show. If you’re interested in learning more about SOA and how you can be successful – check out the new site at www.microsoft.com/soa/launch.

PDC Day 2 – "M" Under OSP, "Lap Around Oslo" & More Services

stevemar — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:36:00 GMT

Day 2 of PDC started off with another fantastic keynote address, thanks to Ray Ozzie, Steve Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, and David Treadwell. They gave some additional details about Windows 7 as a platform for developers, and then passed the torch to Chris Anderson and Don Box for a live coding session. Of course this was very popular, as the pair demonstrated how a developer could build an application and deploy it to the cloud, using Azure Service Platform, including Windows Azure, SQL Services and .NET Services.

We’ve also continued the drumbeat of education on Oslo today. Doug Purdy and Vijaye Raji presented to a packed house their “Lap Around Oslo” session this afternoon. This was the first public demo of the Oslo components, including the “M” language, “Quadrant” visual toolset and repository. Judging from the enthusiastic response of the audience, the initial impression was great. Doug also talked about a few very important next steps for attendees and those interested in Oslo: learn more here at the show, download the CTPs or Oslo SDK and check out the new resources at the Dev Center and GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK. At this stage, we’re proud to have delivered on our commitment to come to PDC with code, and it’s all about refining it based on the needs and thoughts of developers.

Doug also officially announced some news today—we’re proud to be including the “M” language under the Open Specification Promise. Placing “M” under the OSP makes it possible for third parties, including open source projects, to build implementations of "M" for other runtimes, services, applications and operating systems.

So once again, please check it out, and give us your feedback!

PDC Day 1 – Azure Services Platform, CTP availability and much more!

stevemar — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:10:00 GMT

Well, we’re finally here, on the ground in LA at PDC. After months of speculation, chatter and building curiosity about Microsoft’s next move in the cloud space, we’ve officially gone on record with the details. It’s always interesting to take a quick look back at what’s been said up to this point; I have to say, some folks got it right and some were way off. My hope is that the details Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia provided in today’s keynote kick off a fact-based ‘round two’ of these industry discussions.

And while we’re all ready to celebrate, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize what a critical day this is. It’s not just critical for Microsoft, but for partners, developers, consumers, IT Pros and technology watchers alike. We all know that we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift; it’s time to carve out your place in making it real and to move forward. I’ll start: My commitment is to do my part in helping develop and bring to market the best possible solution in the Azure Services Platform. This means continuing to have conversations with partners and customers early on, and pushing the boundaries of transparency to ensure the feedback we’re collecting is based on a fully informed view.

So, let’s start with a few of the most important facts from today’s keynote. There are a host of sources live today that can provide all the nitty gritty details.

· Ray announced the Azure Services Platform today. The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds.

· The Azure Services Platform consists of the following components: Windows Azure, Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services.

· There are CTPs available today, as well as other important technologies that will foster innovation in the world of application development and help to bridge on-premise and cloud domains, such as “Oslo” and the “Dublin” app server enhancements I recently detailed in my blog. Folks at the show today should begin taking a look at all of these pieces.

My group will continue to work on the .NET Services and Windows Azure, as well as “Oslo” (tools, repository and language for modeling), “Dublin”, BizTalk Server and Windows Communication Foundation, Windows WorkFlow Foundation. Thus, we will have our foot in both cloud and premises investments, and those technologies that serve to unite the two: the ‘+’ in S+S, if you will. .NET Services, which was previously the BizTalk Services incubation, includes hosted workflow execution, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and access control for securing applications. These hosted services allow you to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises environments to the cloud. “Oslo”, which we recently provided more details about, was highlighted in the keynote today as the core of Microsoft’s modeling investments for both cloud and premises. We also committed to furthering our interoperability efforts around the declarative language, “M”, by including it under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. “Dublin”, “BizTalk Server” and WCF + WF are also big topics at this year’s PDC, so be sure to check out the sessions to hear more.

I look across all these pieces, and I’m incredibly excited and passionate about what’s to come. I feel confident that our investments in innovation, including both new and existing technologies, are the right ones and will help our customers and partners with more choice, interoperability, better security & reliability, simpler management & planning and truly breathe new life into today’s investments.

Now, on to day 2!

Countdown to Oslo: Introducing "M" and "Quadrant"

stevemar — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:37:00 GMT

Robert Wahbe and I were out on the road this week meeting with press and members of the dev community to talk more about Oslo. For those of you who have been following Oslo, the timing won’t come as a surprise: almost exactly one year ago, we announced it at the SOA BP Conference. Our goal? To make it easier to build apps using models and to break down silos of application development. That means that whether you write the user specification, write the code, or have to manage the application, the model for what the app should do is shared. Any of us that have written or managed apps know that getting everyone to think about requirements in the same way can be a huge challenge. Ultimately, for developers and others in the application lifecycle, this will mean more productivity, transparency and flexibility. For partners, it will mean more opportunities to design domain-specific apps (e.g., through the creation of DSLs, etc.).

One of the things we promised when we made that first announcement was to deliver a CTP of Oslo at the PDC – a commitment I’m very proud to say we’ll keep. In less than three weeks, the those attending the PDC will get a first-hand look at the three technologies that make up Oslo:

A language – codenamed “M” – that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and data models
A relational repository – that makes models available to both tools and platform components
A tool – codenamed “Quadrant” – that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

Now, in case those two codenames sound new; they are. While we’ve talked about both the tool and the language before, today is the first time we’ve publicly referred to them by their codenames: “Quadrant” and “M” which you’ll see reflected in the CTP packaging.

The upcoming CTP was a pretty hot topic during a conversation Robert and I had with a group of developers during dinner a few nights ago. Readers probably know some of these folks already: Shashi Raina, Don Demsak, Marc Adler, Nick Landry, Ambrose Little and Bill Zack. Across the board, these guys seem eager to get their hands on the bits to see for themselves what Oslo is all about (obviously pretty encouraging for me and the rest of the team). The language(“M”) in particular seems to be of interest, which is consistent with what we’ve been hearing over the past year. Here’s why… when we talk to developers about “Modeling” many have the same immediate reaction. They say something like “modeling isn’t for me, I’ll leave the pretty pictures to the business folks and architects. I write code and live in a text editor.”

Which is where “M” comes in. We respond by saying that modeling and writing code are not mutually exclusive, in fact, they are intertwined. “M” gives developers the ability to model applications in text rather than graphics. Nothing against graphics, we have a great tool for that too – Quadrant. “M,” will add the text component that has been missing in the industry so far.

The dinner conversation did get very engaged in a few spots, especially when we started discussing the idea of bringing business analysts and other users closer to the application via the more visual part of the equation, a.k.a. Quadrant. For instance, most people only think about having business analysts interacting in application design. Oslo will allow folks to go well beyond that – if a developer delivers a set of DSLs, an end user could potentially compose the application they need in real time. Most at the table saw the value (and business opportunities) in this, but a couple expressed some distaste at the idea of analysts and others directly interacting with an app. Makes me wonder if everyone else is as passionate about this…?

XAML was another big topic of discussion, with some lively debate over its full potential and role in the Microsoft platform as well as the ability to target other non-MSFT runtimes.

I’ll be talking about all of these areas in more detail over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, only about 17 days to go until that Oslo CTP is available…

The Road to PDC - .NET Framework 4.0 and “Dublin”

stevemar — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:05:00 GMT

We’re within a month of this year’s Professional Developer’s Conference, and like a lot of folks, I’ve bought my ticket and booked my hotel. We’ll unveil a lot of new technology there, but I’d like to provide an early look today at a couple things. You may have already seen some of the news this week about Visual Studio 2010. Today, we’re providing a deeper look into some of the new functionality developers can expect with the next version of the .NET Framework, now officially dubbed “.NET Framework 4.0”. We’re also announcing some important technology enhancements to the app server functionality within future versions of Windows Server, codenamed “Dublin”.

Each of these pieces is interesting by itself, but together we think they significantly simplify the effort required to build, deploy and manage composite applications. As developers are broadly adopting the use of web services to build applications (using a spectrum of both advanced WS-* services as well as lighter weight RESTful services), they are reusing services that can live disparately across their enterprises, or on the web. The best part of composite applications is that they can improve productivity and efficiency on the dev side and give more power to end users for accessing and managing data that’s most critical to the business. As a result of the growing popularity of composite apps, developers require new levels of sophistication for building distributed, long-running, and workflow-centric applications.

This is where today’s news comes in. Updates to the next versions of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) are focused on reducing complexity for developers by providing better support for Web 2.0 technologies like REST, POX and ATOM, and increasing performance and scalability in the process. In fact, early tests show these improvements to WCF and WF are, at a minimum, enabling 10X the perf and scalability—and to think we’re still fine tuning here! Second, “Dublin” makes it easier to deploy, manage and scale these next-generation applications. For a more detailed look at improvements and enhancements in the .NET FW 4.0 components WCF and WF 4.0 as well as “Dublin”, check out this site for additional product details and a Microsoft sponsored Web cast.

We’ve had the opportunity to present an overview of these updates to some of our community members over the last couple weeks, in fact, we already have a variety of partners, including AmberPoint, Eclipsys, Frends Technology, Global 360, RedPrairie, SOA Software Inc., Epicor Software Corporation and Telerik working to take advantage of WF, WCF and “Dublin” in future technologies. Equally important, an internal ISV, Microsoft Dynamics, is also leveraging “Dublin” for future versions.

The fun doesn’t stop here. Next week, you’ll hear more from us on how “Oslo” fits into the picture…

Oslo and Modeling

stevemar — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:29:00 GMT

Just in case you haven’t seen this yet, check out this article in eWEEK from last week. Focuses on Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of CSD, as well as technical fellows, John Shewchuk and Brad Lovering, discussing their thoughts on modeling, Oslo and where is the industry headed. Great insight to how the group has evolved and what’s to come in the upcoming months leading to PDC!

Microsoft Participating in the Object Management Group (OMG)

stevemar — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:32:00 GMT

This week I had the privilege of sitting with Bob Muglia while he taped a short video on his thoughts of how model-driven development could transform the way we develop and manage applications. Bob also announced Microsoft’s participation in the Object Management Group (OMG) standards organization, which owns key modeling standards like UML and BPMN. Given bob’s history, it was great to hear his perspective on how modeling will impact the next generation of computing.

Bob spoke about the opportunity that Microsoft sees to take this kind of approach mainstream – not just the Fortune 50 or Fortune 500, but the Fortune 5 million… In the video, Bob talks about modeling as a core focus of Microsoft’s Dynamic IT strategy, and highlighted three areas of focus for Microsoft: platform, personas and partners.

What is the significance of these 3 “Ps” aside from being a super-cool alliteration? Well, they are the three-part strategy to bringing modeling into the mainstream. We think that by driving modeling capabilities into the core .NET platform, expanding the various types of personas within an organization that can interact with models, and finally expanding the partner ecosystem to create a broad array of solutions and standards, this gives customers – of all sizes – the ability to benefit from modeling as a part of their application development. In many cases, customers will benefit from modeling through natural evolution of existing technologies. They won’t necessarily know they are using modeling when they deploy an app – their life will just get easier.

I’ve talked about “ Oslo” many times here. “Oslo” is the codename for a set of technical investments that will significantly enhance modeling capabilities for Microsoft, our partner ecosystem and our customers. It consists of:

· A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

· A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models

· A repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

It’s also important to note that modeling is a company-wide investment, which means it doesn’t start or stop with “Oslo” – it includes a lot of exciting work we’re doing as part of Visual Studio Team System “Rosario”, System Center, BizTalk Server, SQL Server and more.

Want to know more about the OMG news or what Bob had to say? Check out the video.

BizTalk Server 2009

stevemar — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:43:00 GMT

Today, we announced updated plans for the next major version of BizTalk Server. We launched the first version of BizTalk Server back in 2000. Eight years later, we’ve seen our installed base grow to 8,200 customers making it the most widely deployed solution for enterprise connectivity in heterogeneous environments. We’re hearing from our customers that BizTalk has become a core part of their infrastructure, running mission critical applications. Our partners (over 1500 of them) tell us that the applications and adapters they build for BizTalk have become a significant part of their business. This positive feedback is our greatest reward.

We’re excited to offer more details on the next version of BizTalk Server—now dubbed BizTalk Server 2009 to reflect the full release that it is. Initially, We disclosed this as BizTalk Server 2006 R3, but it has so many exciting new features that it deserves a to be referenced as a full release. BizTalk Server 2009 will focus on a few key areas; as always, these areas are determined based on what customers have told us are their priorities. They are platform support, SOA and Web Services, B2B integration and developer productivity. In particular, the platform updates enable greater scalability and reliability, new Hyper-V virtualization support, and many advances in the latest developer tools.

I should also note that we’re still on track for the final release of BizTalk Server 2009 in 1H of CY2009. For all the features and details, go here or to PressPass.

We’ve actually already delivered a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) to select customers and we’re getting great feedback! The next CTP update is coming sometime in Q4 of CY08. We’ll use this broad feedback from customers and partners to help us validate the features and readiness of the product.

Looking into the future, the goal is to continue to provide a BizTalk Server release approximately every two years, plus additional interim releases of service packs as appropriate. At each milestone, we will take advantage of as much platform technology as is reasonable and consumable by our customers and will take advantage of updates to .NET, Visual Studio, Windows Server and SQL.

We’re also hearing from many of our BizTalk customers that they’re beginning to accelerate the development of more complex composite applications. As you know, one of our missions with “Oslo” is to simplify the development/deployment/management of composite applications through a model-driven approach to the application lifecycle. We see our BizTalk customers benefitting from Oslo’s core technologies, and are committed to providing choice, flexibility and a clear integration path for those who are interested in taking advantage.

Video Clip on Convergence - SaaS, SOA, Virtualization, Modeling

stevemar — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:10:00 GMT

As I have written previously, convergence is a major theme in distributed computing. Darryl Taft (eWeek) recently wrote an article on the topic which was followed up by an article by Loraine Lawson (IT Business Edge). At Tech Ed, I did a quick video to talk about convergence and what it will mean for distributed computing and the role Modeling will play moving forward. Here’s a snip from my previous posting, if it’s interesting, check out the video.

Looking into the future, we see a perfect storm of productivity and application richness brewing. Specifically, SOA, SaaS, Application Virtualization and Modeling will collide and spark a wave of application creation that we haven’t seen since Al Gore invented the Internet. Let me paint you a picture - developers will compose business critical applications from services they didn’t author, run them in datacenters they don’t own, manage them at a policy level, and pay for them by the drink.

BizTalk Services “R12” Release – Workflow

stevemar — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Drum roll please….for those of you are as interested in the advent of cloud services, this is big. Today, we released BizTalk Services “R12” Community Technology Preview (CTP). Just as a refresher: “BizTalk Services” is the code-name for an incubation for our SOA platform-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. BizTalk Services provides Messaging, Identity and Workflow (our latest addition) enabling developers to extend existing premises applications and build new composite applications. See my previous post for additional information.

While the BizTalk Services “R12” CTP includes a variety of updates, the piece that stand out is the release of the anticipated Workflow capabilities. The new cloud-based Workflow capabilities enable ‘service orchestration’ from the cloud. This functionality is based on the Windows Workflow Foundation (.NET Framework component) and can orchestrate services that connect to systems in your enterprise, or to systems running anywhere on the Internet via Web services messages. Using this service, you can define the interaction of any web-addressable services.

In addition to the Workflow functionality, the BizTalk Services Identity Service has been expanded and enhanced to enable more flexibility for scenarios demanded by our customers. R12 introduces a new approach for creating, viewing, and managing access control rules.

The new BizTalk Services “R12” CTP is online and available now for your use and the SDK is available at http://labs.biztalk.net. Whether or not you currently have an account, now’s the time to try it!