Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 Enterprise Edition x64

BizTalk Server 2009 will become generally available in the first
half of 2009, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product
management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, and a
Community Technology Preview will be release before the end of
this year.

Application platform support will be extended to the .NET
Framework 3.5 SP1, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and
Windows Server 2008. BizTalk Server will take advantage of
failover clustering features from Windows Server and will
support Hyper-V, MicrosoftÆs hypervisor.

Integration with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server adds ALM
functions such as automated builds, bug tracking, source
controls and multi-party development. The underlying BizTalk
project system for Visual Studio will also be improved, the
company says.

The new features require Visual Studio 2008, said Kawasaki. ôA
lot of integration[s] we are doing builds on top of 2008 wave,ö
he added.

WhatÆs more, BizTalk will have out-of-the-box Business Activity
Monitoring capabilities with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services,
as well as supporting Unified Dimensional Model cubes and
real-time aggregations that are used in MicrosoftÆs
PerformancePoint Server 2007 business intelligence product.

ôI believe the planned improvements that will become available
in [BizTalk Server 2009] signal Microsoft's continuing intent to
make this product a leading solution in the integration space,
while ensuring that it's development is synchronized with other
major initiatives inside of Microsoft. That's a good strategy,ö
said Ken Vollmer, a principal analyst for Forrester Research.

Outside of the Microsoft stack and beyond the firewall, the 2009
release is slated to have a UDDI 3.0 registry that will provide
for extended discovery services, registry affiliation, a
subscription API and support for digital certificates for
authentication.

For business-to-business integrations, Microsoft is broadening
its support for AS2 and EDI data sharing protocols. New
capabilities will include support for multiple message
attachments, configurable auto message resend and file name
preservation.

BizTalk Server 2009 updates all business rules and message
schemas for compliance with the SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold
certification, increasing functionality as a result.

The company also vows to offer broader guidance for applying
Enterprise Service Bus usage patterns and other tasks.