BizTalk 360

7 June 2011

I assume anybody in the BizTalk space would have known BizTalk 360 by this time. I though I’ll just give my view of the product here.

BizTalk 360 tries to address some of the real challenges we face on a BizTalk environment, especially controlled environments like Production and Test environments. There are 3 core features I personally like about BizTalk 360

Governance/Auditing: This is such an invaluable addition to the tool, on a controlled environment it’s very important to know “who did what”. There were so many instances in the past, where we struggle to identify who stopped the host instance or who Unenlisted a send port etc. With BizTalk 360 we’ll know exactly who did that activity.

Fine Grained Authorization: This allows controlling the user’s access to the environment in a fine grained manner. It helps us reuse the environment by multiple departments/projects, without the fear of one interfering with other resources. We also don’t need to provide direct access for users to access the physical machines.

Topology: We got multiple environments with multiple configurations. In the past when we need to understand the network topology we either need to login to the server and work out BizTalk/SQL server configurations. But with BizTalk 360, it just dynamically plots the network diagram.

The great thing about it, there is a free version as well. The free developer version got pretty much all the essential things that will be useful for development purpose. The only downside I can see is, BizTalk 360 reached the market bit late. If this product was available 3 years ago, I’m pretty sure by this time every reasonable sized company would have got one. But late is better than never.

The commercial editions are also priced reasonably given the amount of functionality it got. I personally know Saravana Kumar, the fellow Microsoft BizTalk Server MVP who is one of the founders of BizTalk 360. I will hugely recommend anyone using Microsoft BizTalk Serer to take a look at BizTalk 360.


BizTalk 2006 R2 version number not updated after applying SP 1

4 March 2010

In the past I have published overview tables of BizTalk version numbers. I used to publish a new table whenever a new version or service pack of BizTalk server was released.

I wanted to do the same after the release of SP1 for BizTalk server 2006 R2. Unfortunately it appears that the version number is not updated after applying the service pack. I double checked with some other people but they faced the same issue.

I already reported this issue to Microsoft and blogged about it for the beta release of the SP but it seems they did not fix it for the final release. It think it is a bad thing as you cannot easily determine which version and sp level is running based on the version number.

Anyway the latest version number table looks like this:

Product name Service pack Version number
BizTalk Server 2004   3.0.4902.0
BizTalk Server 2004 SP1 3.0.6070.0
BizTalk Server 2004 SP2 3.0.7405.0
BizTalk Server 2006   3.5.1602.0
BizTalk Server 2006 R2   3.6.1404.0
BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 3.6.1404.0
BizTalk Server 2009   3.8.368.0

I will report the issue to Microsoft again. Although I double checked with some people I might be wrong here. Please let me know if you see different behavior.

In order to still be able to determine the version number in an easy way I wrote a PowerShell script. I have a post about it here.


Determine BizTalk version using PowerShell

4 March 2010

I wrote a very simple PowerShell script which allows you to easily determine the installed BizTalk version and service pack level.

You cannot just look at the version number anymore because it seems SP1 of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 does not update the version number. This means the version numbers for BizTalk 2006 R2 without and with service pack 1 applied are the same. See also my blog post here.

The script will detect any BizTalk version and service pack from 2004 and later. I have tested it on different environments with different BizTalk versions. Please let me know if it is not working :-(

Below is the source, but you can also download it from here.

# Initialization of helper variables
# BizTalk version numbers
$versionBTS2004 = "3.0.4902.0"
$versionBTS2004SP1 = "3.0.6070.0"
$versionBTS2004SP2 = "3.0.7405.0"
$versionBTS2006 = "3.5.1602.0"
$versionBTS2006R2 = "3.6.1404.0"
$versionBTS2009 = "3.8.368.0"

# BizTalk version description
$descriptionBTS2004 = "BizTalk Server 2004"
$descriptionBTS2004SP1 = "BizTalk Server 2004 with service pack 1"
$descriptionBTS2004SP2 = "BizTalk Server 2004 with service pack 2"
$descriptionBTS2006 = "BizTalk Server 2006"
$descriptionBTS2006R2 = "BizTalk Server 2006 R2"
$descriptionBTS2006R2SP1 = "BizTalk Server 2006 R2 with service pack 1"
$descriptionBTS2009 = "BizTalk Server 2009"

# Registry paths
$bizTalkRegistryPath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\BizTalk Server"
$biztalk2006SP1UninstallRegistryPath = 'HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Biztalk Server 2006 R2 Service Pack 1 `[KB 974563`]'

$installedVersion = $null

# Check if BizTalk is installed:
if ((Test-Path $bizTalkRegistryPath) -eq $true)
{

# Set location to BizTalk registry key
Set-Location $bizTalkRegistryPath
$key = Get-ChildItem

# Get version number
$productVersion = $key.GetValue("ProductVersion")

switch ($productVersion)
{

$versionBTS2004 { $installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2004 }
$versionBTS2004SP1 { $installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2004SP1 }
$versionBTS2004SP2 { $installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2004SP2 }
$versionBTS2006 { $installedVersion = $versionBTS2006 }
$versionBTS2006R2
{
if ((Test-Path $biztalk2006SP1UninstallRegistryPath) -eq $false)
{
$installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2006R2
}
else
{
$installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2006R2SP1
}
}
$versionBTS2009 { $installedVersion = $descriptionBTS2009 }
}
}

if ($installedVersion -eq $null)
{
Write-Host "BizTalk Server is not installed on this machine."
Exit
}

Write-Host "BizTalk Server installation found on this machine."
Write-Host "Product version number: $productVersion"
Write-Host "Installed version: $installedVersion"


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.