I’ve just spent some quality time going through the just-released BizTalk Operations Guide.

I can’t stress enough how significant this document is. It brings together a ton of information on the planning and operations of a healthy BizTalk environment. It provides a bunch of easy to follow checklists.

I believe that everyone involved in development or management of BizTalk solutions should read this document. In fact, you should probably read it several times a year, and refer to it regularly.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDE READING!

Really nice work from Microsoft, and congratulations to everyone involved in producing such a high-quality and practical document. From the doc….

What’s in It?

Guidance based on real-world experience. The idea for the guide originated with Microsoft field representatives, partner organizations, and customers who plan, deploy, and maintain BizTalk Server installations. This group of IT professionals has accumulated extensive hands-on experience with a diverse range of BizTalk solutions. As they gained experience they created checklists, best practices, and presentations to guide future BizTalk Server operations. We collected and organized this information to create the guide.

Key portions of this guide are new; however, a considerable portion consists of documentation taken from BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Help, white papers, Knowledge Base articles, and other sources. It has been carefully reviewed and vetted by experts from the community of BizTalk Server IT professionals and members of the product development team, whom we gratefully acknowledge at the end of this topic. We believe that the information presented here will help BizTalk Server users solve, and above all, avoid many of the common problems that can occur while deploying and maintaining a BizTalk Server installation.

The BizTalk Server Operations guide is now available for download in DOCX, CHM, and PDF file formats at the following locations:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.docx
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.exe
http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/d/aad035e6-e03b-4bea-ad9a-fa1ff8d10ca0/BTS06R2_OpReadiness.pdf