What's next for BizTalk Server?

Well it’s been 2 months since I’ve posted to the blog. One would think that I’d lost interest. Nothing could be further from the truth! Lot’s of interesting stuff going on around here that you folks should know about.

Once we got BizTalk Server 2006 out the door I went and had my wisdom teeth yanked out of my head. What a pain in the … well, mouth actually, that was.

After that the powers that be on the business group went and gave me a small team to manage. I now run the BizTalk Server Technical Product Management team. Interestingly executing well on your own projects isn’t really much at all like enabling others to execute well on theirs. Preparation and relationship building are much more important in this role that they were when I was purely an individual contributor. If asked I would have told you that my weaknesses were planning and the socialization of complex ideas before taking on this job.

The reason I’ve not been blogging much lately is that I’ve been spending a lot of time planning and socializing complex ideas. Funny how that worked out, eh? :^)

So what have we been planning for? After all hearing about what’s coming is why you all tune into our little blog here, isn’t it? Well we have a couple of little conferences coming up. The first of which is Tech Ed 2006, June 11th through 16th in Boston. The BizTalk sessions this year will be legion. We’ve got more breakouts than ever and it’s just about all brand new content. We’ll also be making some pretty big announcements during the show. Keep your ears and eyes peeled in June whether you’ll be in attendance or not. Kris and Steve will be in Boston so make sure to say hello to them if you’re attending this years show.

We’re also holding a series of focus groups at Tech Ed. They're done so that our best customers and partners have a chance to provide direct input to the BizTalk Server product group while we’re in early planning stages for future versions of the product. You can find the details on the focus groups here: https://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2006/focusgroups.mspx (and maybe even get some clues as to what we’re thinking about for the future of BizTalk Server :-).

The next big conference that we’re actively planning for is the 2nd annual Business Process Management and Integration conference, sponsored by the BizTalk Server Product Group. It will be held October 3rd through 6th at the Microsoft Conference Center here in Redmond. Details will be available in early summer but be sure to save the dates. Last years conference was a huge success. We had over 500 partners and customers from 32 countries. This year we think we’ll host around 750 of our closest friends. Bringing that many BizTalk Server aficionados to one place, at one time was, and will again be, a lot of fun, learning and relationship building. Don’t miss out on this one if your livelihood is based partly or wholey on BizTalk Server.

On the macro level, planning has been on the conferences and some other stuff that will be easier to talk about after Tech Ed. ;-) But on a micro level we’re thinking about technical whitepapers and samples around stuff like BizTalk Server 2006 and WinFx, BizTalk Server 2006 and Office 2007, BizTalk Server 2006 as a part of your .NET Service Oriented Architecture as well as a bunch of other interesting topics. These are things that I’ll be posting details on through out the summer and fall. We've also got a line on some great guest posters. Keep your RSS readers pointed to the blog and certainly inject your comments and input back to us. I and the guys are very interested in what you’ve got to say.

Regards,

Mike Woods