BizTalk Server lives on, customers won't be abandoned

Microsoft's middleware, BizTalk, was to become the launching pad for its next big middleware technology, code-named "Oslo." Oslo was to be Microsoft attempt to unify the modeling and storage systems of many of its back office server apps. But on Friday, Microsoft reversed course on BizTalk, announcing that it would continue to be developed as a stand-alone product. The next incarnation will be called BizTalk 2009, which is simply a new name for what would otherwise have been BizTalk Server 2006 R3, scheduled to be released first half next year. A story in Network World reports:

"We will continue to enhance and extend enterprise activity scenarios" in BizTalk, says Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the connected systems division at Microsoft. "We will make it simpler, add new capabilities around [business-to-business], build in our new RFID work and expand it to more general purpose asset-tracking, like tracking laptops or servers in your company, and provide a complete end-to-end asset management view. There will also be enhancements around [business intelligence] and business activity monitoring."

Ultimately current BizTalk customers win with this one -- since folding BizTalk into Oslo could have left them hanging out to dry, needing a major upgrade to continue using the middleware. In the meantime, Oslo, which was vaguely promised during TechEd for Developers in June, will be discussed with developers again during Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October, the story reports. Microsoft has pitched Oslo as the unified basis for "future versions" of Visual Studio, Microsoft System Center, BizTalk Server and Microsoft SQL Server. Oslo is slated to have visual modeling and composition tools, a foundational repository built on SQL Server 2008 for managing application metadata, and a new, declarative modeling language to enable interoperability of models between tools and domain-specific modeling notations. It is also said to have built in messaging (Windows Communications Foundation) and workflow (Windows Workflow Foundation).

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