Nick Heppleston’s BizTalk Blog

I recently spoke with a member of the BizTalk EDI Product Team on e-mail about the feature set between 2004/2006 and 2006 R2 after reading several interesting articles about the forthcoming R2 improvements.

The team have now published a post on their blog providing a feature comparison between BizTalk 2002, 2004/2006 and 2006 R2. As an EDI junkie, the following features are particularly appealing:

• The ability to create custom schemas (I work with a number of trading partners who use EDIFACT 92.1 as their default message set!), although there is a large set already supported.
• Outbound and inbound message batching/de-batching, including the ability to suspend individual messages or an entire transaction.
• No need for additional adapters – all assembling/disassembling *appears* to occur in specialised send and receive pipelines.

I hope these new features will bring BizTalk the B2B/EDI market adoption that have previously required costly (yet excellent) third-party adapters.