4 big features added in BizTalk360 version 7.5 to make your life simple

This blog post is just a quick update on what we are working on for the past few months. We are pretty much ready, we are on final stage of QA verifying all the edge cases. Version 7.5 will be available by end of this month. Here are the 4 great features that’s coming

• Business Rules Viewer
• Graphical Message Flow
• Throttling Analyser
• Knowledge base with tagging support

Business Rules Viewer

This is brand new capability. If you are using BizTalk Business rules engine, then you’ll love this feature. The BizTalk admin console is very limited when it comes to BRE, you can only view the Policies, and some tracking information. If you need more info about the policy then you need to open the “Business Rules Composer”. We solve this problem in BizTalk360 now by marrying the functionality that’s available in admin console and rules composer. Now, you can view all the policies, rules within the policies, tracking information of the policies, deployment history of the policies and even conditions and actions in each rule all within BizTalk360. More over it’s controlled by our user access policy, you can govern who will have access to the rules.

Graphical Message Flow Viewer

We had GMFV for a very long time in BizTalk360, but when we migrated from Silverlight to HTML5 version, we didn’t migrate this feature. We know lot of things that can be improved on graphical message flow, hence we took little bit longer in order to do it properly. It’s complete rewrite. In the new version you have capabilities like you can open at any point (send, receive, orchestration) etc. and traverse in any direction, you can see the message content/context at any point, you can open artifact properties (receive port, send port, and orchestration) and see the details. All in one single place. We wanted to make it really practical and useful, you’ll love it.

Throttling Analyser

This is again a similar story to graphical message flow, we didn’t want to simply port it like for like from our Silverlight version. We wanted to take a step back and see how can we make it really useful for someone to understand the throttling conditions in the environment. We spend lot of time on the design aspect to make it simple and intuitive for people to diagnose throttling problems in the environment. We also did quite bit of work on the back end to make sure system can handle large data collection and optimized queries. It comes with very flexible filtering capabilities in the UI.

Knowledge base with tagging

In the current implementation of KB repository in BizTalk360, it’s kind of limited. You attach knowledge base to error codes ex: 0X43567. But in reality this error code might have different meaning (solution) in different context. So we rewritten the KB implementation to support tagging options. Now you can say when this error code 0X43567 happens in particular application, environment, host, service status etc. then a particular knowledge base article will apply. In a different context, it might have a completely different article. In addition to all these features, as usual we make the product more and more stable in every release. We addressed bunch of bugs and made minor UI improvements. I hope these updates will make BizTalk360 a must have product, if you are using BizTalk server. Curious to see how it’s going to look like, you need to wait for couple more weeks (smile)