Why upgrade to BizTalk Server 2009?
I often get asked what the major reasons would be for upgrading a BizTalk 2006 R2 environment to BizTalk Server 2009.
First of all, the upgrade process is reasonably straightforward (here is a quick walkthrough by Nick Heppleston, and here you can download the official Microsoft documentation), but the main answer to the question is of course one of value. BizTalk 2009 offers significant improvements that add additional value:
Increased developer team productivity
BizTalk Server 2009 is capable of using the latest versions of all of the foundations it is built upon. That means that all of the benefits of these foundations are now also available to BizTalk developers:
- Supports Visual Studio 2008, so developers no longer need to maintain a Visual Studio 2005 environment on their machines just for BizTalk development
- Support for .NET Framework 3.5
- Can use SQL Server 2008 as it’s underlying database server
- Fully integrates with Team Foundation Server
- Property pages for BizTalk artifacts are integrated into Project Designer tabs.
- Migrating projects created for previous versions of BizTalk Server is handled by the Visual Studio project update wizard.
- Support for the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBUILD).
- Support for both release and debug builds
Better operational flexibility
BizTalk Server 2009 has better support for the current capabilities of the Windows Server system:
- It can run on Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
- Running BizTalk in a Hyper-V environment is fully supported
- Support for SQL Server 2008 may mean that you can finally get rid of your last SQL Server 2005 or even SQL Server 2000 machines (or that you at least have the option of doing so when you’re ready)
More functionality
And of course, BizTalk Server 2009 functionality has been expanded on a number of levels. Without attempting to be complete, here is a list of some of the most significant changes and new features:
- EDI Enhancements
- Dynamic EDI Envelope generation
- AS2 Enhancements, like Drummond certification for Multiple Attachments (MA) and Filename Preservations (FN) (link may require registration), and automatic message re-send if MDN not received.
- Enhanced support for SWIFT.
- Support for intelligent RFID devices.
- New set of Adapters in the BizTalk LOB Adapter Pack 2.0
- Enhanced functionality in the BizTalk Adapters for Host Systems