And available for download

Jan 29, 2010 12:56 GMT  ·  By

Although BizTalk Server 2009 has been available for almost an entire year, Microsoft continues to support customers running older versions of the company’s integration and connectivity server solution. In this regard, the first service pack for BizTalk Server 2006 R2 has been finalized and released to web. As of January 27th, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 can download the bits from Microsoft and integrate the first major upgrade for their product. As is the case with all service pack releases for Microsoft products, BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 is available free of charge.

“The SP1 installation program that’s available [on the Microsoft Download Center] offers a unified installation experience: It will automatically detect and update all of the BizTalk Server components that are currently installed on your machine. It will also detect all BizTalk Server hotfixes currently installed, and will distinguish between hotfixes that predate this service pack, and those which were issued after this service pack was released,” Microsoft explained.

Of course, customers that leverage Microsoft’s integration and connectivity server solution should opt for version 2009 of BizTalk Server. In 2008, Microsoft announced that it was rebranding BizTalk Server 2006 R3 as BizTalk Server 2009, a product which was launched in April 2009, and which is also currently available. Business users that opt to stick with BizTalk Server 2006 will be able to take advantage of an SP1 Guide which is offered along with the BizTalk Server 2006 R2 SP1 download.

“SP1 includes a roll-up of hotfixes from the BizTalk Server 2006 and 2006 R2 releases, some hotfixes from the BizTalk Server 2009 release, as well as some additional enhancements. Some of the key fixes and enhancements in this service pack are the following: better reliability, performance, and scale for the following key features; Better management and deployment experiences; and improved support,” the company noted. There are also new features in SP1, including “For WCF-Custom and WCF-CustomIsolated Adapters, the ability to look up custom bindings from locations other than machine.config. Support for using multiple certificates to sign outgoing AS2 messages.”

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 is available for download here.