I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Zinda and Steven Martin at the SDRs last week in Redmond. They discussed some exciting new capabilities across the CSD stack, both in the short term and long term.
In case you missed Steven's public announcement on Monday, it's official. The next release of BizTalk Server is called BizTalk Server 2006 R3, and a CTP drop is planned as early as this summer.
Per "the man" himself, BizTalk Server 2006 R3 takes advantage of "the latest versions of Windows Server, the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and SQL Server." The focus of this release is enhanced SOA support as well as a focus on scalability for mission-critical workloads, improved support for next-generation web and service oriented applications, improved virtualization support and better business insight through Office.
From a SOA and EAI perspective, some notable enhancements include:
New web service registry capabilities with support for UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) version 3.0 Enhanced service enablement of applications (through new and enhanced adapters for LOB applications, databases, and legacy/host systems) Enhanced service enablement of “edge” devices through BizTalk RFID Mobile Enhanced interoperability and connectivity support for industry protocols (like SWIFT, EDI, etc) SOA patterns and best practices guidance to assist our customer’s implementations Please see below for the full announcement on Steven Martin's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2008/04/23/biztalk-server-platform-updates.aspx