Nino Crudele just published a free whitepaper about Azure Fundamental for Ethical Hackers and Special Ops Team. This is a 39 pages whitepaper about Azure Fundamentals and Penetration Testing and if you’re passionate about security or want to know a little more, then you shouldn’t miss this opportunity.
Nino Crudele is a freelance living in the United Kingdom. He is Global Azure Lead and Cybersecurity expert in Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence, a global manufacturing company. He is responsible for leading the Microsoft Azure Cloud area, supporting and advising the Company to select the most appropriate cloud strategies and solutions from high-level design to implementation and Security is one of my top priorities.
What to expect about Azure Fundamental for Ethical Hackers and Special Ops Team whitepaper
This whitepaper will provide:
A good understanding of Microsoft Azure, how it is organized and how it works, and this is a good prerequisite in order to create penetration tests, understanding the weaknesses and the critical areas and for any type of security operator.
A good introduction and understanding about penetration testingS, the phases, the standards, the technique, and the methodologies related to Microsoft Azure
Where you can download it
The whitepaper is completely free and you can download it here:
I would like to take this opportunity also to say thanks to Nino Crudele for inviting me to be is a technical reviewer for this whitepaper, as always with him it was a nightmare but a very enjoyable one.
At our annual event Integrate, Microsoft announced last year that BizTalk Server 2020 should have released in the first quarter of 2019. Only two weeks in the new year, Microsoft has released BizTalk Server 2020 (v3.13.717.0)! In this blog, we want to update you on what’s new in this version of the product.
No Changes in Available Editions
Similar to earlier versions of the product, BizTalk Server 2020 comes in 4 flavors:
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Developer
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Branch
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Standard [to do: changed limitations]
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 Enterprise
You can download these products when you have an Enterprise MSDN account.
New Features in BizTalk Server 2020
During Integrate 2019, Paul Larsen, the Program Manager who is responsible for BizTalk Server, already highlighted which new features are coming in BizTalk Server 2020. You can read a recap about Paul’s session here.
As you can understand from Paul’s session, we were already expecting platform alignment. More importantly, BizTalk Server 2020 contains all features from BizTalk Server 2016, including the 3 Feature Packs, which have been released.
But, let’s have a look at some of the new features and capabilities.
Support for newer platforms
BizTalk Server 2020 adds support for the following Microsoft platforms:
– Visual Studio 2019
– Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10
– SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2016 SP2
– Office 2019, Office 2016
Operational Data Monitoring and Analytics.
Leverage the power of Azure (Application Insight and Event Hub) for deep data storage and Power BI for reporting and viewing of data.
Using Visual Studio Team Services, you can define multi-server deployments of BizTalk Server 2020, and then maintain those systems throughout the application lifecycle.
Using the new Event Hub Adapter, BizTalk Server can send and receive messages with Azure Event Hubs, where BizTalk Server can function as both an event publisher and subscriber, as part of a new Azure cloud-based event-driven application.
Leverage the power of BizTalk in newer office automation workflows by integrating with Adapters that allow you to send or receive Office 365 emails, receive or transmit Office 365 calendar events, and create Office 365 contacts.
Making BizTalk further secure by maintaining audit trails of all management operations.
New Read-Only Operator role
Brand new read-only operator role in facilitating the dev-ops model, where access to production stamp is provided without the ability to update anything.
Additional updates
· Move to new long term supported Microsoft OLEDB Driver for SQL Server
· Support for SSO Affiliate applications in the SFTP adapter
· SQL Availability Group support for BAM DTS Package via SSIS Catalog
· Partially disabled receive locations
· Throughput improvements for Dynamic Send Ports with Ordered Delivery
Deprecated and Removed Features
Some features of the product are deprecated or removed from the product. Here’s the list:
Based on the above lists, and besides the already expected features and improvements, a few features catch the eye.
Audit Log
Until now, no auditing was available for any operations performed against the BizTalk environment. Luckily, from BizTalk Server 2020 on, the Administration console provides auditing of operations. To be able to use this feature, you will have to turn it on in the Group Settings screen.
The auditing data is stored in the Management database, and you can access it via the Operational Services. At the moment, the supported operations are:
Creating, updating and deleting ports
Suspending, resuming and terminating service instances
Adding, updating and removing BizTalk applications
Importing binding files
Although this is a good start, multiple important operations are still missing; think of starting/stopping of ports, orchestrations, and host instances. We hope that Microsoft adds such operations in the future.
Earlier, Microsoft has announced that .NET 4.8 will be supported.
New Read-Only Operator role
The BizTalk Operator role has changed. Where before, it was possible to perform actions like stopping/starting ports and changing the port configuration, this role is now completely read-only. This can certainly be useful for facilitating DevOps scenarios.
When accessing the BizTalk Server 2020 Admin console as a BizTalk Operator, all the operations are still accessible. However, when an operator tries, for example, to stop a port, an error message shows up, and the operation becomes blocked. Unfortunately, the error message is not always clear that the operation is blocked due to insufficient permissions.
BAM Portal is Deprecated
Microsoft has decided to deprecate the BAM portal. Probably due to the new capabilities to push data to Azure, they decided to deprecate the old-fashioned BAM portal. In case you are using BAM, and you are considering upgrading to BizTalk Server 2020, you can still install and configure the BAM portal from the BizTalk installer and configuration wizard; you won’t be left in the dark.
Deprecated and Removed Adapters
Multiple updates in this area as well. For example, Microsoft deprecates the POP3 and the SMTP adapters in favor of the Office 365 adapters, which appeared in the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs. Next, the old SQL adapter has been removed and replaced by the WCF-SQL adapter, and the JDE OneWorld and the WCF-NetTcpRelay adapter have both been deprecated.
BizTalk360 Support of BizTalk Server 2020
The BizTalk360 product team has eagerly followed the developments around BizTalk Server 2020, and we are glad that BizTalk Server 2020 has been released. For BizTalk360, it is evident that the product must support all recent versions of BizTalk Server.
That’s why we made the latest released versions of BizTalk360 and Atomic Scope compatible with BizTalk Server 2020!
Conclusion
BizTalk Server 2020 has been released. This is the 11th version of the product since its inception in 2000. Although we have already seen most of the features of this release (in the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs), this is still a useful release. Especially when you are still on versions older than BizTalk Server 2016, it will certainly be worth upgrading or migrating to this release.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
Microsoft has been discontinuing some actions for some time or at least
running side by side different versions, don’t get me wrong. But they were never
extremely good at providing proper documentation, even in the old days that we
had software releases every two or three years, now imagine in this crazy fast
delivery world that we are leaving! What you see is:
A big gap between the documentation and the features that we have available or not properly documented in terms of how they work;
There is nothing that tells you what was change or how certain task that was possible to do in previous versions of action can now be done.
When I say that for the first time that Microsoft deprecated connection
actions, I mean actual remove from the list of actions on the Logic App design,
taking from the example the two connectors mention above you can’t see
the deprecated action on the Logic App designer anymore:
But don’t be alarmed, your existing logic apps that still use these
deprecated actions continue to work properly.
In this article, we will address the Office 365 Outlook connector and especially the Send an Email V2 action because Send an Email action is now deprecated. So the question here is:
How to send a well-formatted custom HTML Email using Send an Email V2 action available on the Office 365 Outlook connector?
I personally liked the Send
an Email action because we were able to directly put HTML code on the body
property and define that the email body format would be HTML bt setting the
property Is HTML to true.
Quite simple to use and
efficient.
However, Send an email (V2) action has totally different
behavior. First of all, it owns fewer properties:
Is HTM property was removed from this action;
And a completely new look
and feel of the Body property as you see in the picture below:
With a powerful editor similar to what we have in our office tools (Word, Outlook, …)
That also means that we no longer have the possibility to directly insert HTML code into the body property of the message as we did earlier with the previous version. Well, we can write HTML code on the body of this action:
But the end result will not be what you expect:
Unluckily Power Automate designer, we don’t have a Code View button (</>) on the Body property editor, I will be blogging about this feature soon on Serveless360 blog. So, who we are able to send a proper well-formatted HTML Email using Send an email V2 action?
The answer is: unfortunately, at least in my opinion, we need to build the HTML in an action beforehand in a composite action or in a variable. And then put the compose output or variable as the send mail body property, and the action will render correctly the output as an HTML.
To do that we need:
On
the Logic App designer, add the next step by clicking the +New step
button
On
the Choose an action window, enter Variables and select the
action Initialize variable
On
the Variable action configuration:
On
the Name property, type “EmailBody”
On
the Type property, specify the type as “String”
On
the Value property leave it blank
On
the Logic App designer, add the next step by clicking the +New step
button
On
the Choose an action window, enter Variables and select the
action Set variable
On
the Variable action configuration:
On
the Name property, select “EmailBody” variable
On
the Value property, type your custom HTML
Note: you can take as example this fancy HTML Template that I created specifically for this article here: HTML Notification Template to use Logic App or Power Automate Outlook connector and not this basic HTML that you are seeing on the picture.
And then define directly on the Body editor (without switching to Code View) that the body will be the content of the variable we created earlier:
And you will see that you
will be receiving also a well-formatted HTML email on your mailbox:
Thanks Thiago Almeida for the help and credits to Pedro Rosa that helped me creating this HTML Template and most important to be compatible with Outlook because not all the stylesheets that we can apply aren’t compatible.
BizTalk Filter Finder tool got an update and it is now more powerful and with new features and mainly all of that thanks to Michał Plutyński contributions. And for those who are not familiar with this tool, the BizTalk Filter Finder Tool is a simple tool that aims to simplify the process for better understand and maintain solutions based on content-based routing and context-based routing with or without orchestrations involved.
This tool will extend default BizTalk Server capabilities transforming this tedious and sometimes complicate analysis a little simple, easy and fast. You can read more details about this tool in the original post here: BizTalk Filter Finder Tool.
What’s new in the release
A new dropdown list that allows you to select your BizTalk Server environment (you can set up them in the config file), this way is better and easier to use in bigger teams with several environments.
Add filters/search capabilities allowing you to filter the existing subscriptions and only show filters with subscriptions that contain some text;
Hotfix/improvements: Changes in reading orchestration list when it’s used a MessageBoxDb on a different server then ManagementDb.
Credits to Michał Plutyński for becoming a collaborator of this tool.
On 15th of January 2020, Microsoft announced the release of BizTalk Server 2020. There was a lot of buzz on social media about the release. Pretty much all of the posts were highlighting and excited about the new set of features that got shipped in the product.
Even though the release came with a bunch of exciting new features like any other regular software product updates, there are some important points to note, especially for people who invested heavily in Microsoft BizTalk Server for the past 2 decades.
BizTalk Server 2020 is not just a simple software update it’s a game-changer and beginning of a new era.
Two decades of past
That’s how long Microsoft BizTalk Server is in the market.
The first version came in 2000, and now we are in 2020 and excited about the new release “BizTalk Server 2020”. Microsoft consistently released a new version every 2-4 years once for the past 20 years (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2013 R2, 2016 and now 2020) – i.e 11 major releases.
There are very few products in the history of software sustained a two decades life span and still going strong. On Microsoft land I can only think of a few products like Windows, Office, SQL Server are the ones which reached this milestone.
I’m feeling lucky enough to be one of them who worked on this amazing piece of technology for 20 years now. For most of the software developers out there, our career is pretty much determined by our initial few months/years after graduation and where we end up. For some people, you become programmers, again depending on what technology stack you got initial opportunities, some become data guys like DBA’s, IT administrators, and in the modern era new things like AI/ML, Big Data, etc. For me, it was/is BizTalk Server and Integration in general.
In the past 20 years, I have seen various technologies come and go. We ourselves were bitten by choosing a wrong one for BizTalk360 in the initial days. Microsoft Silverlight as our front-end, the thing that looked flashy and promised to change the way Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are build quietly died and we ended up wasting full 1 year rebuilding everything in HTML5. We finally released version 7.0 back in Oct 2013 fully revamped in HTML5
Unless otherwise, the product solves a core problem well, the chances of sustainability for this long is pretty slim.
One decade of future commitment
When Microsoft releases a server product like BizTalk Server, they commit for 10 years of product support commitment. 5 years of regular support and another 5 years of extended support for you to comfortably run your production systems without worrying about the end of life.
BizTalk Server 2020 is Microsoft’s commitment to existing customers who invested in BizTalk Server and future customers the product is supported until 2030.
It’s very important for large enterprises to get this commitment. As I mentioned earlier, you cannot afford to make wrong bets (like what we did on the front-end technology for BizTalk360 using Microsoft Silverlight), you simply end up with wasted time, money and more importantly opportunity. For us, that one year was a very painful period, with limited resources instead of building exciting new features for our customers, we ended up redoing the same thing.
It’s not easy
Even for a large organization like Microsoft, it’s not easy to maintain and improve a legacy matured product like BizTalk Server.
During my long-standing relationship with BizTalk Server in this 20 years period, I have personally dealt with at least 4-5 different completely different sets of teams at Microsoft. This is what I have witnessed
“People will come, people will go but the product stays.”
I can imagine it will be such a hard job to bring people on board to get up to speed understanding such a vast platform and innovate on top of that mixing the old and new era. In spite of the challenges, Microsoft still continued and innovated constantly for the past 20 years.
What goes behind the scene?
On every release, one of the important updates will be platform alignment. BizTalk Server relies on four important underlying platforms, the core Windows Operating System, SQL Server for data, Visual Studio for development tools and finally Microsoft Office for certain dependencies like BAM.
BizTalk Server 2020 supports the following platforms
Visual Studio 2019
Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10
SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2017, SQL Server 2016 SP2
Office 2019, Office 2016
Supporting these new platforms is not always just a recompile of your code. For instance, the team had spent nearly 3 years rebuilding the tools for Visual Studio 2019. Some of the BizTalk Server toolings like Mapper and Orchestration designer is complex. Visual Studio 2019 changed the complete plugin-architecture and significant work has gone behind the scene to make it work.
There are few areas Microsoft does not highlight on the release notes, but that takes a significant amount of time for the product group like accelerators and adapters. Microsoft BizTalk Server is a central middleware hub supporting various industry standards like HL7, SWIFT, etc, these specifications change regularly as well, in every release they need to make sure they support the latest standards.
In a similar way, all those connecting BizTalk adapters like SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, etc all need to be retested and realigned.
Being a global product there are a ton lot of legal procedures they need to pass through before a 20 year old product like BizTalk Server is released to the public.
You probably are not aware, some of the high-end military/defense teams across the world use BizTalk Server, it’s not that easy to commit a new release when you have such sensitive customers.
I remember having a conversation with one of the product owners of BizTalk Server in the past, how tough the whole legal process before they can get a go-ahead for the release.
Hub for modern and legacy world
If you look carefully at how Microsoft is positioning BizTalk Server 2020, it’s positioning it as a hub/window between the legacy and modern world.
The fact is, however the new cloud technology stack spans out and promises to change the world, there will always be an on-premise dependency. It will take at least another few decades (or never), for 100% cloud-native organizations to evolve.
Oh! Do you know still some of the big bank’s core systems are still running on IBM Mainframes built-in 1960 and ’70s?
For the past 10 years, in the enterprise world, it’s always a hybrid scenario, where certain things are best suited for on-premise and certain things are best suited for the cloud, you mix and match the tech stack that’s suitable for your business.
The below picture depicts how Microsoft BizTalk Server can act as a glue between the on-prem and the cloud world and get most of the benefit out of both.
There are a lot of features that shipped with BizTalk Server 2020 supporting this vision.
New customers – is BizTalk Server the right technology?
If you are on a hunt for choosing your middleware platform, it’s not an easy decision to make. With a ton of new products available in the market and each product requiring months of learning to understand the capabilities, it’s never going to be easy to compare and test everything.
But sometimes you need to go with the proven technology and the future vision of the product. BizTalk Server sustained 20 years of constant improvement (a release pretty much every 2-3 years once 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2006 R2, 2009,2010, 2013, 2013 R2, 2016), a lot of features and underlying architecture are robust and scalable to sustain such a long time period.
This long history of the product is such an important decision-making factor.
And the future commitment from Microsoft gearing towards the cloud makes it a perfect candidate for any organization to bet on this middleware platform.
Why BizTalk Server developers and administrators must be excited?
Learning a complex product like BizTalk Server is time consuming long term commitment. It takes years of work and the right projects to fully understand the product and its capabilities. If you have invested your time in the past few years being a BizTalk Developer or Administrator it’s a great time to be excited with the commitment from Microsoft on the future of BizTalk Server.
BizTalk360 is ready for BizTalk Server 2020
For those of you who are not aware of BizTalk360. I would like to give a short intro and excited to announce after working with Microsoft for the past few months, we are now fully supporting Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 with our latest release.
We are a 3rd party product providing advanced monitoring and management capabilities for Microsoft BizTalk Server. Out of the box, BizTalk Server comes with a management console called “BizTalk Admin Console”, which does a great job for people to manage and operate your BizTalk Server environments. However, the tool lacks a lot of advanced capabilities like web-based management console, advanced user access security features, advanced toolings like throttling analyzer, topology viewer, messaging patterns viewer, health dashboards, etc.
Monitoring for a platform like BizTalk Server is so crucial, but BizTalk Server doesn’t come out of the box with any monitoring capabilities. The customers need to rely on Microsoft SCOM or 3rd party products like BizTalk360. SCOM management packs for BizTalk Server is not updated for many years and it comes with only minimal monitoring capabilities.
BizTalk360 is a widely used product in the market with over 650 large enterprises helping them to manage/operate and monitor their BizTalk Server environments. BizTalk360 supports BizTalk Server 2013, 2013 R2, 2016 and now 2020.
Do you feel difficult to keep up to date on all the frequent updates and announcements in the Microsoft Integration platform and Azure iPaaS?
Integration weekly update can be your solution. It’s a weekly update on the topics related to Integration – enterprise integration, robust & scalable messaging capabilities and Citizen Integration capabilities empowered by Microsoft platform to deliver value to the business.
It was only 9 days ago that I released the latest minor version of this package, on that time the goal was to update the Security and Governance stencils to please my dear friend Nino Crudele. It was then that I notice that Microsoft did again a completely redesigned on several of the symbols and of course add new services so I decided that this was the time to not only refresh the package with the new icons but also but so extra work.
What’s new in this version?
With the growing number of stencils in this package, it was becoming hard to easily find or look for the right shape/representation. So once again based on some feedback I received from the community I decide to do so rearranging. I still have many things to do in this project in terms of organization but for now, these are the changes on this major release:
New shapes: The main additions are all the new shapes on the Azure Portal. New shapes added on:
MIS Azure Stencils: containing all the main Azure Portal Services
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils: all shapes related to AI or Machine Learning scenarios;
MIS IoT Devices Stencils: all shapes related to IoT scenarios:
Microsoft Integration Stencils;
MIS Azure Others Stencils: containing Azure Postal Services, features of the services and other interesting shapes;
MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils: other shapes that may be interesting in supporting Azure diagrams and designs or presentations;
MIS Azure Stencils: Complete update to this category with many new shapes added and many shapes moved to MIS Azure Others Stencils file;
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils: Complete update to this category with many new shapes added and updating many others to there current stencils;
Add categories:
Microsoft Integration Stencils Old Version Stencils: containing all the oldest versions of stencils (obsolete, deprecated or replaced by a new shape)
Ordered by name: I recently started to sort shapes in alphabetical order. These are the categories already sorted:
MIS Azure Stencils;
MIS Azure Others Stencils;
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils;
Microsoft Integration Stencils Old Version Stencils;
MIS Security and Governance;
Text Annotations: This is a requested feature and I already started to work on it but it will get some time to finish it. For now, you will see text annotations on:
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils
SVG Files: Add new SVG files, and uniform the name of the files;
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack
Microsoft Integration, Azure, Power Platform, Office 365 and much more Stencils Pack it’s a Visio package that contains fully resizable Visio shapes (symbols/icons) that will help you to visually represent On-premise, Cloud or Hybrid Integration and Enterprise architectures scenarios (BizTalk Server, API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Event Hub…), solutions diagrams and features or systems that use Microsoft Azure and related cloud and on-premises technologies in Visio 2016/2013:
BizTalk Server
Microsoft Azure
Integration
Integration Service Environments (ISE)
Logic Apps and Azure App Service in general (API Apps, Web Apps, and Mobile Apps)
Azure API Management
Messaging: Event Hubs, Event Grid, Service Bus, …
Azure IoT and Docker
AI, Machine Learning, Stream Analytics, Data Factory, Data Pipelines
SQL Server, DocumentDB, CosmosDB, MySQL, …
and so on
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft Flow
PowerApps
Power BI
Office365, SharePoint,…
DevOps and PowerShell
Security and Governance
And much more…
… and now non-related Microsoft technologies like:
SAP Stencils
The Microsoft Integration Stencils Pack is composed of 28 files:
Microsoft Integration Stencils
MIS Azure Stencils
MIS Additional or Support Stencils
MIS AI and Machine Learning Stencils
MIS Apps and Systems Logo Stencils
MIS Azure Additional or Support Stencils
MIS Azure Mono Color
MIS Azure Old Versions
MIS Azure Others Stencils
MIS Buildings Stencils
MIS Databases and Analytics Stencils
MIS Deprecated Stencils
MIS Developer Stencils
MIS Devices Stencils
MIS Files Stencils
MIS Generic Stencils
MIS Infrastructure Stencils
MIS Integration Fun
MIS Integration Patterns Stencils
MIS IoT Devices Stencils
MIS Office365
MIS Power BI Stencils
MIS PowerApps and Flows Stencils
MIS SAP Stencils
MIS Security and Governance
MIS Servers (HEX) Stencils
MIS Users and Roles Stencils
Microsoft Integration Stencils Old Version Stencils
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
I was alerted by fellow Integration MVPs that BizTalk Server 2020 is now available!
Sure enough, it is available for download on MSDN. All versions of BizTalk 2020 including Developer, Branch, Standard, and Enterprise.
The interesting take away is support for Visual Studio 2019! So we skipped over Visual Studio 2017 altogether. Plus support for SQL 2019 and Windows 2019.
There is a nice, long list of What’s New in BizTalk 2020 along with some notable deprecations including the POP and SOAP adapters.
BizTalk360 Product Support – Every year brings a new learning and new experience. We receive support tickets through different channels like emails, support portal, feedback widget. It is the responsibility of every support engineer to make sure the support case is taken care of and resolved on time, thereby aiming for 100 % customer satisfaction.
2019, of course, was a better year than before. A lot of customer relationship calls, best practice sessions, customer demos and much more. We are happy to share the stats of the support cases handled by us in 2019. This is the result of our continuous hard work and dedication which has resulted in some really positive numbers in BizTalk360 Customer Support.
Total tickets received for technical product support – 1274
No of tickets closed – 1064
Nearly 75% of the tickets resolved within SLA
January and September were busiest months which had the highest number of tickets received
Customer Satisfaction Report
This is another interesting factor which helps to know the rating of customer satisfaction. For every support ticket that is getting closed, there is a customer survey that gets attached to the closure response where they rate the resolution provided by the support engineers.
The rating may be awesome, neutral or disappointed. The customers can provide their comments as per the resolution provided. The customer satisfaction reports help us improve our support based on the ratings and comments that we receive from the customers. This report is taken every week. We are happy to inform that most of the responses we received were of ‘Awesome’ rating and very few had the other ratings.
Here are some of the customer quotes the BizTalk360 Support team has received in the past few months:
“Your support is amazing. It will definitely be a selling point here :-).”
“Fantastic support. Thank you!”
“Thanks for the quick and effective solution for monitoring this scenario. It is working for us. Really appreciate it!”
“Felt good to get a resolution which exactly solved our problem well done “
“Quick, friendly and very knowledgeable support! very happy with the service :)”
These kinds of comments motivate us to do more and thereby providing the best customer support.
Here is a one such customer satisfaction report:
Major Releases in 2019
The feedback portal is one place where the customers can provide their suggestions and valuable feedback on the features that they already use and also features that they expect in BizTalk360. It is based on these feedback and customer votes; the features are selected for every release.
In 2019, we had 5 major releases, 8.9.5, 8.9.6, 9.0 Phase 1, 2 and 3.
For the list of new features and enhancements shipped in each release, refer to the release notes.
Some of the highlighting features added in 2019 are:
SQL cluster monitoring
Clustered host instance monitoring
Dynatrace integration for Analytics
BizTalk360 Activities Auditing
BizTalk Group Dashboard
Configuring polling interval for monitoring
Database size monitoring
SMTP Notification channel
Quick alarm configuration
For more details on the top 10 features in 2019, refer to the link. Also, the release includes enhancements as well as bug fixes. We always recommend the customers to upgrade to the latest version so that they are in line with our releases. This will avoid the issues with the product and helps us in the support as well.
In addition to the CR calls, to help customers in all aspects and understand their challenges, the client relationship team introduced the Quarterly health check session this year. In this session, we, the technical support engineers, would assist the customers in the upgrade process if they require assistance and understand their challenges in using BizTalk360 and provide resolutions.
This makes us understand the customers’ expectations better and help in improving the product to cater to the needs of the customer. As the saying goes, ‘Every ending has a new beginning’, the end of 2019 has brought us new lessons and experiences with various customers and new processes. Every support case has a lesson in it, be it the customer scenario, their infrastructure settings or our way of troubleshooting the case, our responses. We make sure that we improve our support, thereby making our customers happy and working more efficiently.
As part of the customer services, we also have the on-site BizTalk360 consultancy. Sometimes it would be more convenient to speak to somebody in person and with your BizTalk environment at hand. For such scenarios, we provide our customers with the opportunity to have an experienced BizTalk360 Product Consultant visit you at your premises.
The client relationship calls done every quarter helps us understand the pain points of the customers and the most used features in BizTalk360. The resolutions would be provided immediately in the call if possible or separate tickets would be raised for the issues so that it would be easy for tracking.
In 2020
2020 is, of course, going to be a very great year, with no doubt at all, the important reason being BizTalk 2020 will be announced by Microsoft which in turn sets the pace for the new features to be included in BizTalk360.
The most awaited event in the Microsoft Integration space, Integrate2020 is on the way. The dates and venues are finalized. Grab the early bird offer which ends by March 31st, 2020.
We have an upcoming webinar on “BizTalk360 Product v9.x product walkthrough”. Please register for the same here. More webinars to come on the way.
Conclusion
We would like to request you, our customers, so please take the time to fill this questionnaire. This helps us to prioritize the next upcoming feature tasks and will let us know what your main pain points are. In case of any queries, you can always write to support@biztalk360.com, so that we can immediately get your queries answered and resolve the issues. Happy monitoring with BizTalk360!
Every ending has a new beginning. Let’s hope and pray for 2020 to bring loads of wonders and happiness.
![Azure Fundamental for Ethical Hackers and Special Ops Team [free whitepaper] By Nino Crudele](https://www.biztalkgurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Azure-Fundamental-for-Ethical-Hackers-and-Special-Ops-Team-1-150x150.png)
well done “
