Impressions of Day One of BizTalk Integration Summit

Day one of the BizTalk Integration Summit is over. Here is what I came away with.

Microsoft is commited to the BizTalk platform. They have scheduled major releases every other year, along with minor releases every other year. There will be a BizTalk Server 2013 R2 release in early 2014 with a major release in 2015. A lot of the minor 2014 release will focus on improving healthcare integration with support for HL7 2.6, HL7 Accelerator improvements, 64-bit MLLP, dynamic MLLP port. Also, R2 will bring JSON REST support, proxy support for SFTP, service bus adapters and map engine improvements.

Much of the day was spent discussing the future of Azure BizTalk Services and business project management. BizTalk Services went live and there are a number of Microsoft partners deploying solutions. Business project management is on the horizon and they are gathering information on what should be included. It probably will include a notation for modeling, unified tools, out of the box business activities templates, a web based Business Rules Engine, web-based configuration. It will be build on .Net workflow engine. It is clear that Microsoft is focused on cloud computing.