I don’t believe there are any components or tools to do this ‘out of the box’, but any BAM components developed with BizTalk 2006 R2 work fine in 2009 based on my experience. You should also be able to copy across any of the existing BAM databases.

Nick.

Its a really interesting discussion point to understand how organisations manage and maintain BizTalk. I think sometimes its actually organisational challenges which are as much of a factor as anything else.

To give an example what you describe above is the most common pattern I tend to see or hear about, however I had a few discussions with Kent Weare at the MVP summit about how his company do this and I must admit I really liked it. Essentially development, support, operations fall under the responsibility of the same area for BizTalk/Integration. This means that the equivelent of the BizTalk Operator is part of the same team as the BizTalk Administrator and BizTalk developers (the actual people doing these roles may also do other things)

This means that by working closely together they have a much better understanding of the effect their decisions and actions have in these other areas. Essentially this means developers have an increased accountability for their solutions and need to produce good code otherwise their team feels the pain.

One of the problem with the above stuff is that the hand over from development to production is so often despite best efforts a “throw it over a fence” thing.

Its good that you have outlined the minimum expectations for operations and support teams as too often they have limited guidance and there isnt really too much available in the way of training. My personal view is that if all operations teams can be encouraged to use a proper monitoring tool and then actually use it to drive the support they do then they are heading in the right direction

All the best
Mike

Cheers, Nick.

Great post, only saw it now for the first time. I represent a company that firmly believes in the concepts and principals you outline here. Unfortunately we still find that many organizations do not put the required sort of importance on the operational side of BizTalk Server – I actually blogged about this on my blog the other day!

We have created a product to make monitoring of BizTalk Server Enterprise solutions even simpler and more effective. The product is called Minotaur, a BizTalk monitoring product that supports proactive and reactive monitoring of BizTalk Enterprise Solutions.

The product has a powerful notification engine to ensure support engineers are notified when a failure occurs or when a monitored threshold has been breached. Minotaur also has a cool dashboard that displays the status of the monitored BizTalk environment in real-time.

WebSite: http://www.ragingbulltech.com/
ScreenShots: http://www.ragingbulltech.com/downloads/MinotaurDocumentation.zip
Raging Bull Tech Blog: http://www.ragingbulltech.com/index.php?option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=lyftenbloggie&category=0&Itemid=56
My Blog: http://geekswithblogs.net/BizTalkmonitoring/Default.aspx

Since your blog post hit such an accord with us, we would value you taking the time to look at our product – I definately think you will find it inline with your approach to the operational side of BizTalk server.

Riaan