BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has just been released.
The key new features differentiating the new release from BizTalk Server 2006 are:
- Native support for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
- Native support of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
- While BizTalk Server 2006 integrates with Microsoft Office 2003 components and Windows XP (on a client OS), BizTalk Server 2006 R2 integrates with Office 2007 and Windows Vista.
- Can make use of .Net 3.0 technologies such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for messaging and Windows Workflow Foundation for BAM (Business Activity Monitoring).
- New edition of BizTalk, called BizTalk Server Branch Edition. This edition is ideal for Hub and Spoke deployment scenarios for which only 1 BizTalk application is running in the Spoke nodes. Its official price is 1,800 USD; making it less than a quarter of the price of BizTalk Server Standard Edition. See BizTalk Server Editions for more details.
Both BizTalk Server 2006 and 2006 R2 supports only Visual Studio 2005 so far.
Visual Studio 2008 will be supported through a BizTalk Server Service Pack so that the BizTalk installation routine will be able to detect VS2008 and run with it.
For some, RFID is the most exciting feature introduced with BizTalk Server 2006 R2. The BizTalk RFID features include:
- Data management capabilities.
- Device abstraction and management capabilities.
- Event processing engine that allows the creation of business rules and manage the execution of event pipelines for RFID events.
For more details about the new features of BizTalk Server 2006 R2, check the BizTalk Server roadmap.