This release allows customers to achieve true hybrid connectivity by connecting on-premise systems to SaaS applications through Azure connectivity. In this blog, we will be discussing the new set of cloud adapters (Blob Storage, Service Bus, Event Hubs, O365 Mail, O365 Schedule, O365 Contact).
Note: All these adapter features were already built-in with the BizTalk Server 2016 Feature Packs.
Blob Storage Adapter
With the Blob storage adapter, you can send and receive files of any format (video, audio, images, XML, .pdf, .txt, .zip, .pptx, etc.) between BizTalk Server and Azure Blob Storage with very few configurations.
Create a Windows Azure Storage Account with a container
Configure AzureBlobStorage in Send Port to send message to blob /Configure AzureBlobStorage in Receive Location to receive a message from blob
Using this Blob Adapter, the administrator can have the Backup BizTalk Server Job to back up the databases and log files and easily upload that to an Azure Blob Storage account.
Scenario 1 – Send Message to Azure Blob Storage
When a file dropped into a folder, a BizTalk receive port that listens to that folder will pick up the file. It can then be routed to a send port that subscribes to the files coming in through the receive port. The send port is configured with the AzureBlobStorage adapter and will send the file to a container in Windows Azure Storage, according to its configuration.
Create a receive port using the File adapter” FileReceivePort”, map that to your receive location where the file gets dropped
Create a send port with type “AzureBlobStorage”. Update the blob details as below
Configure Azure properties – Sign in to your Subscription, Select the subscription and Resource Group that has your Azure Storage account
Configure General Properties – Select the Storage Authentication method Shared access signature/Access keys (The connection string will be automatically populated if you select Access Key method)
Select the Blob Container, enter the blob name, you can also use the macros and enter the namespace for blob metadata
You can set the Blob type and the write mode i.e Create new/Overwrite/Appends in the advanced properties settings
Scenario 2 – Receive Message from Azure Blob Storage
The BizTalk receive location which is configured with the AzureBlobStorage adapter will receive a file. When a file is uploaded in the Azure Blob container, it will then be routed to the subscribed send port folder location.
Create a Receive Port, add a Receive Location as type “AzureBlobStorage” and configure the blob details as below;
Configure Azure properties – Sign-in to your Subscription, Select the subscription and Resource Group that has your Azure Storage account
Configure General Properties – Select the Storage Authentication method Shared access signature/Access keys (The connection string will be automatically populated if you select Access Key method). Select the Blob Container Name, Blob Name prefix (in my case it was ‘Order’) and Namespace for blob metadata, click Apply
You can set “Polling Interval”, “Maximum messages per batch”, “Parallel download- Max number of blobs to download parallel” and “Error threshold – when the receive location reaches this number of errors, the receive location is disabled.” in advanced properties
Event Hubs Adapter
Event Hubs capture is the easiest way to load/process streaming data into Azure. You can send/receive a large volume of messages between BizTalk Server and Azure Event Hubs using Event Hub Adapter was the streaming data is captured to Azure Blob Storage.
For instance, you can save and process all your tracking data in an Event Hub using the EventHub Adapter.
You can configure the EventHub Adapter in a Send Port to send messages to Event Hub/Configure the EventHub Adapter in a Receive Location to receive a message from Event Hubs.
The publisher/subscriber can connect to the Event Hub by using shared access signature token
Configure the Messageproperties, the Namespace for User-Defined Message Properties and you can also promote the same
Service Bus Adapter
You can use the SB-Messaging adapter to connect to your on-premises BizTalk Server to Azure. The Service Bus (SB-Messaging) adapter is used to receive and send from Service Bus entities like Queues, Topics, and Relays.
For instance, you can send a message on a service bus queue via Postman which will be later picked up by on-premise BizTalk Server, using the SB-Messaging adapter.
Note: POP3 and SMTP adapters are now deprecated, for that Office365 adapter is set as a replacement.
You can use the Office365 Outlook adapters in BizTalk to send and receive messages between BizTalk Server and Office365 Outlook features by configuring below few steps;
Office365 account – Configure Office365 with proper credentials, which will authorize BizTalk to connect to, and access the Office365 account
Configure BizTalk TMS – which is a service that manages the Office365 OAuth tokens used by BizTalk. It refreshes these tokens periodically, ensuring that the tokens always remain valid
Office365 Outlook Email – The Office 365 Outlook Email Adapter allows you to send and receive emails from your Office 365 Outlook Email from BizTalk.
Send Mail Using a Send Port
Set the following properties to transmit emails via a send port;
To, CC– separate email addresses with a semicolon (‘;’), maximum 256 characters
Subject– enter a maximum of 256 characters
Importance– select Low, Normal or High from the drop-down in the Send Port
You can also attach the files and BizTalk message parts by configuring the attachment properties.
Receive Email Using a Receive Port
Set the following properties to get office365 email to the specific folder via receive port;
Select a folder from which to retrieve email. The default folder is set as Inbox
Select a timestamp from which you want to receive emails. i.e receivedTimeStamp
Retrieve unread emails only
Select an action after the email has been read, like marking the email as read or deleting the email
Once you receive an email on a Receive Location, the Receive pipeline adds promoted properties, which you can use for routing the emails.
Office365 Calendar Adapter
You can create and receive calendar events from your Office365 Outlook Calendar by using Office365 Outlook Calendar adapter in BizTalk Server.
Create calendar event using send port: Configure the receive location such that when an XML file is received in receive folder. the send port creates an event in your Office365 Outlook calendar based on the details provided in the XML file
Receive calendar event XML: Create a FILE send port to receive messages from your Office365 Outlook Calendar and map that to an Office365 Outlook Calendar receive location (by setting send port filters)
Outlook Contact Adapter
You can create contacts in your Office365 Outlook by configuring the Outlook Contact adapter in a send port.
Note: You can only create contacts, you cannot get the contact details. i.e, the Outlook Contact Adapter is not available in receive location to get the contact details.
Conclusion
BizTalk360 is ready for BizTalk Server 2020. Why not give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments.
Stay tuned to get more exciting blogs on BizTalk Server 2020!
Once again, I update this stencil pack with requested shapes from community members: Azure HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource) and Azure Synapse Analytics. The result was the addition of 16 new shapes. I hope you enjoy it.
What’s new in this version?
The main goal of this release was to provide the new icons present in the Azure Portal and update existing ones. In this version, the changes and additions are:
New shapes: New shapes added on MIS Apps and Systems Logo Stencils, Microsoft Integration Stencils, MIS Users and Roles Stencils, MIS Files Stencils, MIS Azure Others Stencils, and MIS Azure Stencils;
SVG Files: Add new SVG files, and uniform all the filenames;
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 27 files:
Microsoft Integration 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 Azure 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
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
I am always paying attention to requests from members of the community, and whenever I can, I update this stencil pack with requested shapes or functionalities. And this is one of these cases, Josh asked me to add DevOps offerings stencils in special: Boards, Repos, Pipelines, Test Plans, and Artifacts.
The result was this. I hope you enjoy it.
What’s new in this version?
The main goal of this release was to provide the new icons present in the Azure Portal and update existing ones. In this version, the changes and additions are:
New shapes: New shapes added on MIS Developer Stencils;
SVG Files: Add new SVG files, and uniform all the filenames;
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 27 files:
Microsoft Integration 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 Azure 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
That you can use and resize without losing quality, in particular, the new shapes.
We are delighted to inform you that BizTalk360 Stop Alerts for maintenance capability is enhanced, and it is renamed as “Schedule Maintenance”. As we know BizTalk360 keeps up its standard by improvising the existing feature and implements new functionality into it in a way that eases the user experience to the next level.
At present in BizTalk360, the user can only set immediate maintenance schedules. In the upcoming release, users will be able to create immediate maintenance, one-time maintenance and recurrence maintenance associating the business holiday calendar. In recurrence maintenance, users can create daily, weekly and monthly recurrence.
Importance of Having Maintenance
Software maintenance is a part of the Software Development Life Cycle. Its main purpose is to modify and update software applications after delivery to correct faults and to improve the performance of the system. It is a very broad activity that takes place soon after the development completed. It optimizes the system’s performance by reducing errors, eliminating useless development and applying advanced development.
In the BizTalk Server, you may have regular maintenance implemented depending on resource availability/skill-set and organizational focus based on the following cases,
BizTalk Message Box Health Maintenance
BizTalk Performance Tuning
Management of BizTalk Server versioning, hotfixes, and service packs
Verification of source code location and management
BizTalk Security Lockdown
BizTalk Source Code Control
Configuration of BizTalk Test Environment
Establishment of rules for proper BizTalk Server Administration, Release Management, Operations Management, Development Management, and Database Management
Why Schedule Maintenance is Implemented in BizTalk360?
BizTalk360 allows you to set up monitoring on application artifacts and allows you to auto-correct artifacts that have hit an unexpected state. During day to day operations, it is very helpful to have this monitoring in place as it saves the BizTalk administrator(s) a lot of time because they don’t have to do that monitoring manually. However, there are also times that you don’t want this monitoring to be active. Thinking of the scenario during maintenance windows because of deployments or installation of security patches. In such cases you may need to temporarily stop monitoring, BizTalk360 provides a feature called ‘Stop Alerts for Maintenance’, which enabled the user to set up a single maintenance window.
Enriched Schedule Maintenance Functionality
The latest BizTalk360 will hold the enriched form of stop alerts for maintenance that is nothing but the schedule maintenance. In which you can set the following maintenance,
Immediate maintenance
One-Time maintenance
Recurrence maintenance
Note: Even if the system is set for maintenance you may need to get alerts for any of the configured artifacts. In such case BizTalk360 ease you with the so-called field “Exclude alarm” in the general maintenance configuration part. Select the alarm for which you wanted to receive the alert even under maintenance.
Immediate Maintenance
Immediate maintenance is used to set the maintenance from the current time (by enabling the immediate toggle button) till the end date and end time which is set.
Let’s consider a couple of scenarios where the BizTalk Server need immediate maintenance,
The running BizTalk Server or services go down
The BizTalk application does not function as expected
In this case, if your infrastructure is unhealthy, then you need to undergo maintenance on a swift to bring the BizTalk environment up and healthy. At the same time, you (based on the business impact there is a customer, who holds 200 plus alarms under an environment) would have configured alarm for monitoring the artifacts in the corresponding environment. So that the alarm will keep triggering the alerts as per the configuration. Since the environment itself is down the alarms will meet the threshold condition and will start sending the violation alerts, as the same health alarm and data monitoring alarm will be sending the alert too.
In addition to it, if an alarm holds Autocorrect then the auto-correct functionality will try to push the artifacts to match the expected state, due to which the down alert will be sent, which may lead to full your inbox with BizTalk360 alerts.
To avoid such a situation, you can set the immediate maintenance just by enabling the toggle and based on the maintenance prominence you can set the end date & time. So that the BizTalk360 monitoring service will no longer perform the autocorrect and will not send. At this point in time, you can set the immediate maintenance which prevents the monitoring service from sending the alerts for the environment.
One-Time Maintenance
By using the One-Time maintenance, you can able to schedule/plan your future maintenance period in advance. For scheduling the One-Time maintenance click on the One-Time in the selection bar and set the Start date and start time when you wanted to get the maintenance enabled in BizTalk360 and set the end date and time when you wanted your maintenance to stop.
Say for instance, if your BizTalk server going to progress on a continuous integration approach and effective deployment then this process may take about a day or two based on the impact of the application going to get deployed and it will be a pre-planned approach which BizTalk Server undergoes. For which you can set the maintenance schedule in advance using our One-Time maintenance in BizTalk360.
Note: BizTalk360 will allow you to set the span across days for One-Time and Recurrence maintenance as shown in the below figure.
Recurrence Maintenance
In general, you might be aware of Administrative Maintenance in BizTalk Server, which is maintenance checks should be performed on a BizTalk Server system on a routine basis as part of a preventive maintenance program. Performing the checks will help you determine whether there are reliability, administration, security, or performance issues with the system.
BizTalk suggest best practices for Administrative Maintenance as below,
For weekly maintenance checks –Reliability check, Administration check, Security check and Performance check (Click here for more details).
For monthly maintenance checks – Reliability check, Administration check, Integrity check, Security check and Performance check (Click here for more details).
Considering the Administrative Maintenance in BizTalk Server, Recurrence Maintenance has been implemented as an icing on the cake in Schedule Maintenance. Recurrence maintenance is a type of maintenance which allows you to create maintenance once, and then have it recreated automatically after a designated time interval. You can make any existing maintenance into recurring maintenance by simply using the recurrence button at the top of the task window. It will let the maintenance run in BizTalk360 between the Start Date -Start Time and End Date – End Time set, during which the monitoring service will stop sending the alert for the corresponding environment.
Recurrence maintenance comes with the following maintenance possibilities,
Daily
Weekly
Monthly- Date of the Month & Day of the Week
Recurrence Maintenance – Daily
Maintenance will be set daily on stipulated the start and end time and based on the recur value set, the maintenance will be running on an alternative day, i.e. if the recurring value is set as 2, the maintenance will run 2 days once and so on.
Let us consider that if BizTalk360 sends an alert message during the non-business hours, the message would get piled up in your inbox. So that you may tend to miss any important alert which may have a huge business impact. As a solution to it, you can set the Daily maintenance during the non-business hours which will relieve you from this great mess.
Recurrence Maintenance – Weekly
Maintenance will be set weekly on stipulated the start and end time and based on the recur value set, the maintenance will be running on the alternative selected week, i.e. if the recurring value is set as 3, the maintenance will run 3 weeks once and so on. Say, for instance, If the recurring value is set to 3 and on days is set to Monday and Thursday, then by calculating the start date checks for the next 3rd occurrence Monday and will set BizTalk360 into maintenance mode. As the same checks for 3rd occurrence Thursday and the next 3rd occurrence Monday from that day on and goes on and on till the end date set.
Recurrence maintenance – Monthly
Maintenance will be set monthly on the desired start and end time. By choosing the monthly recurrence you can set maintenance in the below two combination
Date of the Month
Day of the Week
Date of the Month: Maintenance will be running regularly on the corresponding date of month which is chosen in the Date and Months field. Say for instance, if the month field provided with February, April, June and date field is provided with 2, 29 then BizTak360 will calculate the current date (e.g. 25-02-2020) based on which the maintenance will run on February 29 (only for leap year if not it will consider next cycle on April 2) on the maintenance gets completed it will calculate the next cycle April 2 and so on.
Day of the Week: Maintenance will be running regularly on the week of the month that is chosen on the month’s field. Wherein day of the week recurrence, you can able to precisely set the weekly maintenance i.e. if you want to create recurring maintenance repeating on 1st and 3rd Wednesday of every month. However, you can select the month FEB, APR and days e.g. 1st & 3rd WED. So that the maintenance will run on every 1st and 3rd WED of the selected month.
Schedule Audit History
Adding a feather to the crown, BizTalk360 provides you audit functionality for Schedule maintenance. Keeping the core impact of the maintenance in concern audit for the below action is provided,
Create
Update
Delete
Stop
Completed
As we know the importance of having maintenance in BizTalk360. It is always a good habit to keep the maintenance in a track so that you can able to know who had set/edited/stop/deleted the maintenance for what cause.
Note: Only the superuser is permitted to take control over the schedule maintenance
Note: When the maintenance is set, BizTalk360 will show the maintenance alert pop up in the operation and monitoring home dashboard and you can able to stop the maintenance from the home screen of operation and monitor section just by clicking on the “Stop Maintenance” button in which you can also provide the reason in the popup for stopping the maintenance same will be audited in the schedule audit history.
Conclusion
We can assure the new improvements in the schedule maintenance capability will give you smooth control over BizTalk360 monitoring during the infrastructure maintenance. Why not, give BizTalk360 a try! It takes about 10 minutes to install on your BizTalk environments and you can witness and check the security and productivity of your own BizTalk Environments.
As of today, there is still no BizTalk Server 2020 Developer VM image available in Azure.
So, what do we need to do to configure a developer environment in Azure?
Here are some easy steps to get you up to running in no time:
Disclaimer: an MSDN subscription is required to make use of developer licenses.
Step 1: Create a new VM based on the “SQL Server 2017 on Windows Server 2016 image”:
Why? It is possible to assign this image a “free developer license”. This image also comes with SQL Server 2017 (and Management Studio) installed and preconfigured.
Step 2: Download and install Visual Studio 2019 Professional
Step 3: Download, install and Configure BizTalk Server 2020 Developer Edition from MSDN.
Step 5: Install the BizTalk Server Developer tools (more info there)
NEW: With Visual Studio 2019 and BizTalk Server 2020, the Developer tools are now installed using a separate plugin.
Conclusion: In 5 easy steps, my development environment was ready in about 2 hours. The VM size used was a “Standard D4s v3 (4 vcpus, 16 GiB memory)”.
