The BizTalk Server team blog sneaked out an announcement yesterday that you might have missed. I caught it due to an RSS feed. BizTalk Server 2010 R2 is coming. Now the question is when, and a better question will they change the name, as they should to BizTalk 2011?
We have a while to wait, no firm dates yet, but since it adds support for Windows Server 8 and SQL Server 2010 (codename Denali) which don’t have announced release dates yet either, that isn’t too much of a surprise. They are saying about six months after those products release. Support for Visual Studio 11 was also part of the announcement.
It doesn’t sound at all earth shattering, more just a bit of a jiggle. It may calm some of the fears as they are frequently bandied about from the title of the article, that BizTalk is a dying breed. Rest assured that QuickLearn will be on the forefront of training for this new product as soon as a beta is available.
In addition to support for the new platforms another point of interest is a change to licensing making it possible to provide BizTalk as a hosted service , and to transfer a license to a hosting provider. This is obviously a step in moving BizTalk into the cloud, a change that has long been planned. We’ll have to see what that means as to whether Microsoft will be a possible provider themselves (a la Office 365 and SharePoint online).
That’s about it for what’s new unless you are interested in IBM host integration there are some adapter improvements that way. For the whole article check out the BizTalk Team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalk_server_team_blog/archive/2011/12/08/biztalk-server-2010-r2.aspx
Until next time, see you in the funny papers.