Microsoft Monday released the first public beta of the BizTalk Server 2009 and made available RFID mobile features for the current version of the software.

The beta is feature complete, according to Microsoft officials, who hope to ship BizTalk Server 2009 in the first half of next year.

The software's feature set is designed to make the server a more worthy enterprise business process middleware and better integrate it with other Microsoft software such as Windows Server 2008, virtualization and Visual Studio development tools.

The software also includes enhancements to failover clustering and integration with Microsoft's application life-cycle management tools.

"[Those things are] not as sexy as RFID could be to some folks, but they are equally important," says Ken Vollmer, principal analyst with Forrester Research. "All of this points to BizTalk as more of an enterprise capable product."

The beta of BizTalk Server 2009 is available here.  

Microsoft also says BizTalk RFID Mobile, a stack of software to extend RFID client capabilities to Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices, is available to users of BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The RFID Mobile software will be included in BizTalk Server 2009.

Microsoft also released the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack, which adds support for RFID standards, Tag Data Translation and Low Level Reader Protocol.

BizTalk Server 2009 originally began development as the R3 version of BizTalk Server 2006.

Microsoft, however, reset its BizTalk road map in September as rumors persisted that BizTalk was on the way out and a new product code-named Oslo would emerge in its place.

"We have had a good history of shipping BizTalk regularly," says Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the connected systems division at Microsoft. "We were getting a lot of questions about what the next five years looked like. People were starting to plan further out."

Kawasaki says Microsoft is in the planning stage for what is code-named BizTalk 7 and will make details public in early 2009. The company is committed to its two-year release cycle for the software, he adds.

Kawasaki says that Oslo, Microsoft's modeling platform, was complementary to BizTalk, and will help integrate Oslo model-driven applications with those developed for BizTalk.