TechNet Wiki BizTalk Server Year Overview: New versions, contributors and content

2013 has been a successful year for the BizTalk Server product. The 8th release of the product called BizTalk Server 2013 was released in April 2013. It was a major release of the product with enhancements, innovation and improvements. The most important aspect of this release was the cloud alignment providing connectivity with the cloud through the REST, SB-Messaging and Relay adapters (See BizTalk Server 2013: New Adapters, BizTalk Server 2013: Connect to the Windows Azure Service Bus, and BizTalk Server 2013: REST Support through WCF-WebHttp) and the ability to run BizTalk Server in the a Virtual Machine in Azure (See BizTalk Server 2013: IAAS Provisioning a Virtual Machine).

The release of BizTalk Server 2013 resulted in over 20+ new Wiki articles on this new version. Now this may look like it is a small number. However, most of the BizTalk Server 2010 articles also apply for the 2013 version. The number of BizTalk Server 2010 increased close to 80 articles this year. Therefore, there are currently more than a 100 articles on latest two BizTalk Server versions. That is amazing!

2013 has been successful year for BizTalk content for the TechNet Wiki. The number of contributors that regularly contribute articles increased. The following people made an impressive effort in contributing great content. Here's a list of the BizTalk professionals with a with examples of their contributions:

• Suleiman Shakhtour
  • BizTalk Server 2013: How to use SFTP Adapter
  • BizTalk Server 2013: How to Configure SFTP Send Port Dynamically
  • BizTalk Server 2013: Creating Custom Adapter Provider in ESB Toolkit SFTP As an Example
• Tomasso Groenendijk
  • ESB Toolkit: How to create a Custom Itinerary Messaging Service
  • Creating a MessageBox On-Ramp in the ESB Toolkit
  • Creating a Custom Itinerary Orchestration Service for the Recipient List pattern
• Maheshkumar S Tiwari
  • BizTalk Developer Interview Questions and Answers
    • About Schemas
    • About Maps 
    • About Helper Class 
    • About Orchestration
    • About Business Activity Monitoring
    • About Pipelines
    • About Adapter
    • About BizTalk Application 
    • About XSLT 
    • About Functoid 
    • About Visual Studio 
    • About Business Rule Engine 
    • About EDI
    • About Database

These three have produced more than 50% of the BizTalk 2010/2013 content this year. Very good work guys! There a few more that have made contributions this year:

• Mandi Anez Ohlinger [MSFT]
• Sandro Pereira
• Tord G.Nordahl
• Colin Meade
• Leonid Ganeline
• Lex Hegt
• M.R.ASHWINPRABHU
• SAAkhlaq
• Mohit Kumar Gupta
• Naresh Nagpal

2013 also brought us a new service called BizTalk Services in the cloud. This brand new service in Windows Azure is meant to provide EAI or B2B services through the cloud. The EAI Service enables you to exchange data through different protocols and transform it to and from different formats. Similar to what the on premise BizTalk offers through mapping and routing. The B2B services offers Businesses to exchange data between their partners. You can view it as a new way of EDI data exchange other than a value added network (VAN). It became available first in preview mode (June 2013) and later GA (General Available, November). For more information on BizTalk Services, see TechNet Wiki article Windows Azure BizTalk Services Resources on the TechNet Wiki.

Finally a lot has been shared with you readers of the TechNet wiki and/or also during, TechEd's, the MVP, and BizTalk Integration Summit. In that context the TechNet Wiki has been proven valuable in the past, 2013 and will be in the upcoming year 2014.

Steef-Jan Wiggers (Blog, Wiki, Twitter, Profile)