Microsoft Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Update

I get the ESB question a lot here lately when I talk to financial services organizations. Traditionally we have felt that ESB's are not products they are how you compose a set of technologies to create a message bus that spans across multiple disparate systems providing message oriented management and routing for an enterprise. Microsoft has always had the enabling technologies to build an ESB, that has never been the issue. However, it kind of was. Customers and partner are less inclined to "reinvent the wheel" and build a custom ESB in their enterprise.

I am happy to say that we are finally listening. We are not necessarily production an ESB but rather giving our customers ESB guidance, jump starts and built in platform support. Unfortunately I do not have too many details at the moment but we are activity working on those details.

Like I said, the ESB Guidance is currently under development. An early access program has been created for Microsoft partners and customers whom are working on ESB based projects. Many features are functional, however not all have been completed nor and for the final product we want to make sure everything is fully tested in their entirety.

Customers who are working on an ESB project can obtain the Microsoft ESB Guidance by working with a partner participating in the early access program. Others will be determined on an exception basis. To request a list of qualified partners who are participating in the early access program, please send an email request to esbtlkt@Microsoft.com. A list of the current partners in the early access program can be found on the Microsoft SOA/ESB Web site, https://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/solutions/soa/esb.mspx

The final released version is scheduled to coincide with the release of BizTalk 2006 R2.