BizTalk Server has long been one of the most powerful — and unwieldy — tools in Microsoft’s server arsenal. Sadly, BizTalk 2006 is what BizTalk 2004 should have been, and one wonders why it took so long to arrive. Frankly, I’m not sure that Microsoft really knows what to do with BizTalk. I believe that the product is misunderstood even within Microsoft itself, and I do not think the marketing and sales teams really know how to market and sell it. When you consider the number of years that BizTalk has existed (six), it has a very small number of customers.
Developers naturally want to write custom code, so it’s not easy to convince them of BizTalk’s benefits. It certainly doesn’t help when Windows Workflow (WF) comes along with a big marketing bang and further distracts the developer community. Now you’ve got developers looking at the WF design surface and thinking that it looks just like BizTalk’s, so it must be the same, and it must be better because it’s newer. True or not, this is the kind of problem that Microsoft has created for itself.
I believe that Microsoft needs a different approach to selling BizTalk. First of all, the product group needs to get a grip on the product’s future direction, and then educate — repeatedly! — Microsoft’s sales teams until they finally understand the product and how to sell it. Second, pushing feature lists is a lost cause. Your average CIO/CTO doesn’t care. Microsoft should be selling BizTalk with specific business scenarios. They could build example solutions that are written in both C# and in BizTalk, and show explicitly how BizTalk reduces code, brings in management and monitoring features, etc. Reducing the barrier to entry is critical. Providing extensive samples and prescriptive guidance for developers would help adoption from the technical side.
Here’s my list of the top three issues in BizTalk 2006 that the product group should address in v.Next:
Inadequate support for medium to large sized messages. In an ideal world all messages would be 0-150KB, but realistically people need to send around metadata plus documents like PDFs, etc. The larger the message size the quicker problems are encountered, from hosts running out of memory and crashing to high CPU utilization to extreme SQL Server stress.
BAM is extremely valuable but still too hard to configure, so it is not used as often as it should be, and that is really a shame. The tools need to be brought together into the Visual Studio IDE or into the Admin Console.
Debugging tools are not even CLOSE to Microsoft standards. Visual Studio is known for an outstanding debugging experience, and BizTalk has a horrible debugging experience. We should be able to open a BizTalk project and directly debug pipelines and orchestrations in the IDE.
What else should the product team improve upon? How could Microsoft better position BizTalk in the market? I’d love to hear your opinions.
