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Microsoft is pushing Windows Azure BizTalk Services

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Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides integration capabilities in the cloud for EAI and B2B. This relative new service on Windows Azure was made available for customers in November 2013. WABS is a cloud integration platform or integration platform as a service or IPaaS. Characteristic of IPaaS is that you can build your integration on premise, deploy in the cloud, where it is hosted in a service (a set of dedicated hardware). The service is offered through a subscription model for operating the service in the cloud (for BizTalk Services this means Windows Azure hence the name Windows Azure BizTalk Services). Currently there are quite some players offering that kind of service like Dell, Attunity, MuleSoft, TIBCO, and so on.

Microsoft is currently pushing the service hard to catch up with some of these players and try to quicken/hasten the maturity of the product. Therefore, Microsoft has committed to have a release cadence for new features every three months. The recent release was in February 2014, which added new features for WABS. These new features are:

  • EDIFACT Protocol Support and X12 Schema Updates
  • Pulling Messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics
  • Service Bus Shared Access Signatures (SAS) support with Service Bus Queues and Topics
  • BizTalk Adapter Services No Longer Needs SQL On Premises
  • Backup and Restore Support
  • Operation Log Support

The release of WABS last November has resulted in quite a substantial number of TechNet Wiki articles. The best entry point is, no surprise here: Windows Azure BizTalk Services resources on the TechNet Wiki. This page lists the articles that have been written on WABS and its predecessor Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs (a beta of WABS). In a period of a few months almost twenty articles have been written by various authors within the BizTalk community, MVP's and Microsoft staff (in random order):

The new features to WABS has extended the flexibility and ability to create cloud solutions. However, WABS will need more adapters (sources/destinations) for instance to be able to compete with some of the other IPaaS vendors like MuleSoft, who offers a great deal of adapters. Another aspect of WABS is that most of the configuration is done through Visual Studio a main component currently to build, deploy and manage a bridge solution. This shows the huge dependency WABS currently has with Visual Studio. Managing for instance some parts of a bridge solution like configuration of sources and destinations is preferable better in a different tool like management console/web application or within Windows Azure itself. Since this is still the first release after the go-live of WABS last year in November you can expect improvement of the service in many areas. This will results a more wiki articles on WABS in the future.

Steef-Jan Wiggers (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2014
    Nice overview and summary of where we are today with WABS. Some very important points raised that need to be taken on-board in order to bring the offering from what still feels like a beta to a solid platform that customers can be confident of adopting. MuleSoft are pushing hard in the .NET Integration space lately, they clearly see a gap.
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2014
    Exciting stuff! I did a prezi at a UG last week just on the new mapper. So many new features!
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2014
    Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2014
    This is a great Wiki-eye view of WABS! Thank you, Steef-Jan!
  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2014
    very nice indeed
  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2014
    About two and a half years ago I wrote a post about the BizTalk Server activity on the TechNet Wiki.
  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2014
    Currently we as BizTalk Wiki Ninja’s are assembling and creating an eBook containing a subset of
  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2014
    سرور biztalk طی رشد 13 ساله خود به بلوغ کاملی از امکانات رسیده که هم اکنون دربردارنده محصولاتی چون مجموعه
  • Anonymous
    November 08, 2014
    حدود یک سال قبل متني در رابطه با فعالیت سروربیزتاک در تکنت ویکی منتشر شد . بعد از آن حدود 40 مقاله در
  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2014
    حدود یک سال قبل مطلبي در رابطه با فعالیت سروربیزتاک در تکنت ویکی منتشر شد . بعد از آن حدود 40 مقاله در