BizTalk360 – Version 3.2.36 released

by | Feb 7, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

London, 7th Feb 2012. We are happy to announce the immediate availability of version 3.2. We have been working on this version for the past 6 months. We branched off couple of months prior to our earlier 2.5 release to work on this version. We released our first public beta on 1st of December 2011. We were planning to go live on 1st week of January, but delayed it by 5 weeks to squeeze in few more features along with this release. Here are the top features added to this release

DOWNLOAD LINK : http://www.biztalk360.com/content/download

1. Tracking Data

Now users can query tracking data directly from BizTalk360, you can query Tracked service instances and Tracked message events. It comes with a rich query building capabilities as shown below. BizTalk360 also allows to restrict users from accessing tracking data, thanks to it’s fine grained authorization module. User can also view the tracked message content and context properties. User’s can be restricted from viewing tracked message content.

2. Graphical Message Flow viewer

This is one of the most anticipated feature for this release, for the first time user can visualize the message flow within your environment. The legend shows incoming message, message with subscription, and outgoing message. Users can rearrange the drawing, zoom in-out, select the link to get clear message flow in complex scenarios. Detailed article,  Read More information

3. Throttling Analyser

Another exciting feature for this release, throttling analyser ease to understand the throttling behaviour in the BizTalk environment, user don’t need to have any deep BizTalk knowledge to understand throttling. Users can get near real time visibility of throttling conditions in the environment and plan for capacity and SLA’s. Last 7 days worth of throttling data preserved for history. Read More information. Watch these videos: 1. Understand Throttling, 2. Throttling Analyser

4. SMS/Text alert capability

BizTalk360 now comes with inbuilt SMS/Text message capability. We built our own SMS gateway deployed in Windows Azure (High Availability with multiple instances), so that users don’t need to worry about 3rd party integrations. Easy to configure. Note: Pricing yet to be decided, paid customers get free service until 30th April 2012. Read more information

5. Tracking Manager

Tracking manager allows user to view all the artifacts tracking setting for an application in one single view, it helps to visualize the tracking configuration. Tracking got certain level of performance impact, so it’s important to turn off unnecessary ones

6. Advanced Event Viewer Enhancements

We enhanced the advanced event viewer for security and performance reasons (to address this issue). Now the super user can configure the logs and sources required to be collected, rather than collecting the complete list. This improves performance and also adds security benefit by not showing everything in the server to support people.

7. Performance/Stability/MSI improvements

We worked hard on improving the performance of BizTalk360, we introduced aspect oriented programming techniques to cache information that doesn’t change frequently (ex: topology, database settings, server settings, license verification, user access policies etc.). We also improved the stability of BizTalk360, we addressed all the customer related bugs in this release. We also made huge improvements to the MSI package. The MSI package now understands database versioning and supports upgrades from previous versions (3.1 beta onwards).

We hope you enjoy using all these features and provide better support/monitoring capabilities to your own organisation or customers. If you got any queries please feel free to contact us via http://www.biztalk360.com/content/contact

Nandri!
Saravana Kumar
Founder/CTO – BizTalk360

http://www.biztalk360.com | http://support.biztalk360.com
@biztalk360 | http://facebook.com/biztalk360  | http://getsatisfaction.com/biztalk360

How Significant is the SQL Server 2012 Release?

by | Feb 5, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

SQL Server, particularly its relational database engine, matured quite some time ago. So the “significance” of every new release over recent years can be viewed-in some ways-as relatively nominal. The last watershed release of the product was actually SQL Server 2005, which was when the relational engine (that, for years, defined SQL Server) stopped occupying […]
Blog Post by: Lenni Lobel

A flying start for BizTalkAdminsblogging.com

by | Feb 5, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

BizTalkadminsblogging has had a tremendous start. Within a week and a half 13 posts already and this will be number 14. An average almost two blog posts a day. This reflects the high demand for BizTalk administration related information, the need for sharing it and desire to create more exposure for this aspect of BizTalk Server. Jeroen and Joris have done an excellent job setting up this blog site, running and maintaining it. The recent posts have touched topics like PowerShell, Microsoft Operation Framework, and so on.

There is also a TechNet Wiki, where some of the bloggers and others have written articles on BizTalk Administration. I, Tord G. Nordahl, Sandro Pereira, Howard S. Edidin and Microsoft have written the following articles that are related to BizTalk administration:

As you can see that is quite an extensive list (20+ articles).

In the near future Jeroen and I want to organize an event with the Dutch BizTalk User Group that is focused on BizTalk administration. A similar event has already taken place last week. The Ordina BizTalk Innovation Event with topic Administration and Monitoring has been a great success. More than 40 attendees were present at the event. This shows the growing commitment of the community towards BizTalk administration.

BizTalk series: Introducing Abhijit Mahato

by | Feb 2, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Writing these stories so far on community members has been a great experience and I received a lot of positive feedback. The stories continue with the fourth story in the BizTalk Community Series that brings active BizTalk community members to the foreground. The story today is on Abhijit Mahato. He is a Microsoft Community Contributor since 2011, a blogger and an active BizTalk forum member.

Abhijit is married to his lovely wife Laxmi, and they are expecting their first child in March 2012. His family lives in Kolkata, also known as “The City of Joy, City of Palaces, the Cultural capital of India”, located in the eastern part of India.

Abhijit currently works as a Senior BizTalk Consultant at Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT Services, Consulting and Outsourcing companies with over 115,000 people operating in 40 countries. His job involves working with customers on integration projects especially using BizTalk Server, WCF (.Net) and SQL Server (SSIS). He loves to design, architect, and develop BizTalk Solution. Also he likes to install and configure BizTalk Server.

He had his first integration project using BizTalk Server 2004 in the year 2005. His senior project manager and customer highly appreciated his work and effort. This motivated him to do more integration projects. Since then Abhijit has worked on many large and complex integration projects with BizTalk.

Abhijit feels that the best thing about working in any integration project is learning BizTalk (Integration product) and also the opportunity to learn other technologies like SAP, EDI, MS CRM and so on. What he likes the most about BizTalk Server product and I quote is:

“It is currently one of the most mature, reliable and stable integration server in the industry.”
 
Furthermore he describes the product in the following manner:

“It has got a huge number of “out of the box” adapters; and there is a long list of other features like message persistence, recovery in case of failure in communication, correlation, long running transactions, monitoring of business processes, complex mapping, and the ESB. Furthermore BizTalk contains a number of tools like BRE, BAM, SSO, BizTalk Admin console and so on enhancing productivity.”
 
Finally Abhijit is very excited about Microsoft’s recent announcement of the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2, and is looking forward to exploring and working with this new release.
In his spare time, Abhijit loves to spend time with his family and friends, take participation in various quiz competitions and enjoy solving mathematical and logical puzzles. Besides that he loves reading technical blogs on new Microsoft technologies like Windows AppFabric,Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Azure. Finally he also spends time in contributing to MSDN BizTalk forums and write blogs posts about BizTalk issues and related topics.

Abhijit would like to thank people for reading his posts and appreciates if they can also provide feedback. This will keep him motivated to continue to contribute. He feels this will also improve the online BizTalk community experience for others.

A final quote from Abhijit:
 
“I believe that one doesn’t ever get tired until he makes the last attempt and doesn’t ever make the last attempt until he is successful.”
 
I would like to thank Abhijit for his contributions to the community and the time he took to have a chat with me.

Azure: Current IP Range of Data Centers

by | Feb 1, 2012 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

With the ever changing Azure space, chances are you’ve had services working a treat
and then one day just fail.

“Can’t connect” etc.

This has happened to me twice this week – with over 14 IP Address ranges defined in
the client’s firewall rules.

It appears that my service bus services were spun up or assigned another IP outside
the ’allowed range’.

It gets frustrating at times as generally the process goes as follows:

1) fill out a form to request firewall changes. Include as much detail as possible.

2) hand to the client and they delegate to their security/ops team to implement.

3) confirmation comes back.

4) start up ServiceBus service

5) could work?? may fail – due to *another* IP address allocated in Windows Azure
not on the ’allowed list of ranges’.

6) fill out another form asking for another IP Address

By the 3rd iteration of this process it all is beginning to look very unprofessional.
(in comparison, these guys are used to tasks such as ’Access to SQL Server XXX – here’s
the ports, there’s the machine and done’. Azure on the other hand – ’What IP Addresses
do you need? What ports?’ we need better information in this area)

Anyway – here’s the most update to date list 10/02/2011.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabricannounce/archive/2010/01/28/additional-data-centers-for-windows-azure-platform-appfabric.aspx

Blog Post by: Mick Badran