New BizTalk Server 2020 – Features and advantages
Introduction:
Traditionally, integration has been either on-premises system-to-system EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), or business-to-business (B2B). Many companies want to integrate with systems beyond the corporate firewall. These systems are often SaaS-based, API-centric providers handling everything from sales leads to invoicing, email, and social media. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2020 allows customers to integrate disparate applications and heterogeneous data to deliver a variety of solutions, including payment processing, supply chain management, business-to-business EDI, real-time decision making, and reporting. This release allows customers to achieve true hybrid connectivity by connecting on-premises systems to SaaS applications through Azure connectivity.
What’s new?:
Following are the feature wise details of what’s new in BizTalk 2020:
| Features | Description |
| Support for newer platforms | BizTalk Server 2020 adds support for the following Microsoft platforms: – Visual Studio 2019 (Enterprise and Professional editions are supported) |
| Analytics | Operational Data Monitoring and Analytics. Leveraging the power of Azure (Application Insight and Event Hub) for deep data storage and Power BI for reporting and viewing of data. |
| Application Lifecycle Management with VSTS | Using Visual Studio Team Services, you can define multi-server deployments of BizTalk Server 2020, and then maintain those systems throughout the application lifecycle |
| Management API’s | Manage your environment remotely using the new REST APIs with full Swagger support |
| Support for Always Encrypted | Use the WCF-SQL adapter to connect to SQL Server secure Always Encrypted columns. |
| Advanced Scheduling | New and improved scheduling capabilities in Adapters |
| Backup to Azure Blob Storage | When deploying BizTalk Server to Azure VMs, you can backup BizTalk Server databases to Azure blob storage |
| Adapter for Service Bus v2 | When using the Service Bus Adapter, you can utilize Azure Service Bus Premium for enterprise-scale workloads |
| Transport Layer Security 1.2 | Securely deploy BizTalk Server using industry-standard TLS 1.2 authentication and encryption. |
| API Management | Publish Orchestration endpoints using Azure API Management, enabling organizations to publish APIs to external, partner and internal developers to unlock the potential of their data and services. |
| Event Hubs Adapter: | Using the new Event Hub Adapter, BizTalk Server can send and receive messages with Azure Event Hubs, where BizTalk Server can function as both an event publisher and subscriber, as part of a new Azure cloud-based event-driven application |
| Office 365 Adapters | Leverage the power of BizTalk in newer office automation workflows by integrating with Adapters that allows you to send or receive Office 365 emails, receive or transmit Office 365 calendar events and create Office 365 contacts |
| Group Managed Service Accounts | Extend windows GMSA support to BizTalk operations and services |
| Blob Adapter | Send and Receive messages to/from Azure Blob Storage |
| Audit Log | Making BizTalk further secure by maintaining audit trails of all management operation |
| New Read Only Operator role | Brand new read only operator role to facilitate dev ops model, where access to production stamp is provided without the ability to update anything |
| XSLT 3.0 | New extensible model for runtime map execution, out of box wiring to work with Saxon XSLT3.0 |
| Additional updates | Move to new long term supported Microsoft OLEDB Driver for SQL Server. Support for SSO Affiliate applications in SFTP adapter. SQL Availability Group support for BAM DTS Package via SSIS Catalog. Partially disabled receive locations. Throughput improvements for Dynamic Send Ports with Ordered Delivery |
Advantages:
The advantages of using BizTalk server 2020, if we decide to go with it, are:
1. 10 years of BizTalk Server product support commitment from Microsoft
2. Save tracking data in Azure, and view data through Application Insights or Power BI for reporting. BAM is still there but deprecated
3. Automated BizTalk Server applications deployment to different BizTalk environments through VSTS/Azure DevOps
4. New Adapters for Azure Services like Logic App, Service Bus, EventHub, Office 365, Storage, API Management, etc.
5. Audit trails of management operations like Port creation/deletion
6. XSLT 3.0 transformations support
7. Receive Location Fault Tolerance in an HA setup
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/install-and-config-guides/whats-new-in-biztalk-server-2020
