Initial customer feedback on BizTalk Server 2009

As most of you may know from a previous entry in this blog, the first beta release of BizTalk Server 2009 has been made publicly available.

You can download it directly, after signing with a Live ID, from here.

We also made available the first CTP of the BizTalk 2009 ESB Guidance in codeplex.

A major theme of this release is the enhanced developer productivity and the significantly improved developer team experience.

This was made possible through integration with Microsoft’s application life-cycle management (ALM) solution: Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server.

I wanted to share with you the exciting feedback from an early adopter.
Gulf Coast Seal Ltd. took part in the Technology Adaption Program (TAP) of BizTalk Server 2009. Today their solution is already in production.
Here is what Jeff Lynch, Gulf Coast Seal's Information Technology Manager, has to say about BizTalk Server 2009:

“I really can’t tell you just how happy using BizTalk Server 2009 as a fully supported part of VSTS and TFS makes me. …
…Having BizTalk Server 2009 seamlessly fit into our application development life cycle under Team Foundation Server is extremely important in terms of our confidence in using BizTalk as the “glue” which binds our business processes together. Today, over 48% of our sales transactions and over 25% of our entire revenue stream comes in via BizTalk Server and to say that it’s “vital to our business” is an understatement.”

“In case I haven’t already mentioned this. The build and deploy speed of this beta is excellent. I just built and deployed a four project solution in less than 30 seconds in a virtual machine. This is substantially faster than BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Even my complex solutions are building very quickly and deploying in a matter of minutes. It is also nice to see the deployment detail being written to the Output window in Visual Studio 2008.”

I thought this might encourage you to start downloading and testing the Beta version of BizTalk 2009 if you have not done so already J…

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