BizTalk360 version 7.2 released. 60+ items big and small added to this release

It’s three months since our 7.1 release back in January, but I think you’ll be happy with what we have in store for you in the 7.2.688 release. Stabilizing the quality of the product is the hard bit. Especially if you are an on-premise product development company, there are various combinations of platforms like OS, version of BizTalk, SQL, IIS, Browsers to tackle and make sure it works in all combinations. The product will only get stabilized by multiple iterations, constantly fixing bugs, addressing customer use cases etc. Even though 7.2 looks like a small incremental release (by version number wise), under the hood it’s one of the big releases we have done. There are about 60 items added to 7.2 (big and small), one of the key drivers for 7.2 is to fix all the outstanding bugs, user improvements, performance improvements and of course bundle 3 to 4 cool new features. NOTE: If you are still relying on the 6.x Silverlight version, please do not upgrade to 7.2, we no longer supporting Silverlight in new versions. Let’s take a look at what’s packed in this release.

Brand New Features

• Messages Query, Download messages as Zip, and Email messages directly.
• Resources view in Application
• Rich visualization for Schema View

UI Improvements

Refresh animation fixed in multiple screens.

• Dashboard, Custom SQL Query, Application List, Message Box Viewer Report, Platform settings, and
• Drop down boxes loading (when data returned from server)

Performance Improvement

• Application detail screen loading time
• Slow performance for non-super users in certain screens like application list loading, platform settings screen and message box query execution.
• Host Instances screen loading time
• Web endpoints monitoring look up is asynchronous now

Enhancements

• Monitoring : Ability to set “System Resources” CPU & Memory monitoring minimum value from 0
• Monitoring : UI label added to show process monitoring is configured in UTC time
• Advanced Event Viewer : Ability to view errors, warning and information together, previously you need to choose one.
• Query : Resume, Suspend, Terminate large number of service instances, previously you’ll receive time out.
• Query : The filters are now kept open by default, avoiding unnecessary click to expand
• Query : Suspend dehydrated instances
• Query : Fixed all the drop down lists to have values in ascending order
• ESB Portal : Export results in CSV format
• ESB Portal : Query for any text contained in error message
• ESB Portal : Included Exception message column in query result
• Settings : Ability to generate license request directly in the UI, previously you need to rely on an external windows forms application
• General Health : If the UI and database versions are not compatible, an error message will be displayed
• General Health : Improved logging across monitoring service and plugins to improve support
• Custom SQL : Now the number of rows returned can be configured, default increased from 50 to 300
• Knowledgebase : KB article icon is displayed only when there is an article. Previously it was displayed all the time, making it difficult to interpret whether KB article is present or not.
• HPOM: Title and Description mapping swap. Previously description item was mapped to Title and was too long.

Bug Fixes

• UI : Dashboard icons hover effect on Firefox
• UI : Knowledgebase pop-up screen toolbar icons were jumbled
• UI : In some places date time text boxes and labels were showing the default date time value 02-01-0001 instead of null
• Security : Custom SQL Query permission not assigned correctly
• Advanced Event Viewer : KB article icon was not present.
• Query : Context properties and Message content were not displayed for tracking service instance queries
• Query : On query builder, drop down list holds previously selected values in few screens (Message Box Queries, Tracking queries, ESB Exception Queries etc.)
• Custom SQL : Download the result in CSV format, previously handled at client side and was not reliable.
• Orchestration : Screen get stuck with “Loading icon…” due to not handling the mandatory field properly
• Host Instances : Clustered host instances were showing extra rows in certain cases.
• Monitoring : When SQL servers are configured using settings, the exception was not handled correctly
• Monitoring : CPU monitoring was looking at BizTalk360 server rather than remote BizTalk server
• Monitoring : Alarm mapping should not be displayed for normal users, since it has the ability to delete mappings
• Monitoring : Warning message box is displayed before delete. Previously alarm will get deleted as soon as the user click “Delete”
• Monitoring : Manage alarm screen was not handling exceptions gracefully.
• Monitoring : When you configure monitoring for all send ports and receive locations with large amount of ports resulted in time out error
• Monitoring : Stop alert for maintenance was throwing exception on non UK servers
• Monitoring : Alert history, improved the accuracy of logging message created and transmitted status.

There are quite lot of items added to this release, technically we should called it 8.0 due to the amount of work gone into the release. This blog post is just to give you the summary, you can see detailed comments on each of the items in our release notice. You can download and start using it straight away. For customers with support contract, this is a free upgrade. You simply need to run the new MSI on top of existing MSI, the installer will take care of smooth migration. For the next couple of weeks, we will blog about the new features added to 7.2 and some interesting facts on performance improvements and UI improvements. Stay Tuned!!