Some readers responded to my post on
Why I'm Falling in Love with BizTalk with some negative comments about things like BizTalk pricing, documentation, transaction throughput etc. Mike Woods, the Sr. Technical Product Manager on the BizTalk team, provided an informative response to these concerns that I wanted to highlight:
We're looking at future SKU differentiation in order to make the technology appealing to a broader audience in future versions. That includes the possibility of reworking price points.
Integration and process server technology is still very young. We suffer from that a bit as does the rest of the industry. BizTalk Server 2006 does indeed buff out those rough edges you run up against with the current product.
We don't believe that blogging replaces documentations at all. We've been steadily improving the documentation since RTM. If you haven't downloaded the latest docs please do so. Also you'll notice a link on each doc page that enables you to provide feedback directly to the User Experience team which writes the docs. We take customer input serious and this is a great way for us to collect actionable feedback that we can apply to the next round of documentation updates if customers use it.
As for the BizTalk related blogging, we're proud of the community that has sprung up. It's a lot of fun to interact with partners and customers in near real time during all stages of the product life cycle. I personally hope that the community keeps getting stronger.
Finally on performance; if you're truly seeing 1 transaction per second then something isn't right. The SOAP adapter and heavy use of orchestration will knock your transaction rates down. Depending on what you're doing you should be able to get that up over a hundred Tx/sec. on a well tuned BizTalk server farm. I've attached a couple of perf related links below (Mea culpa - one is a blog :^).
Finally keep on using and blogging BizTalk Server. The BizTalk Product group does hear you and we're working hard to address your concerns.
Although BizTalk is far from perfect, it's making huge strides in the right direction and provides numerous features that XML developers will find compelling.
Posted
Apr 25 2005, 02:35 PM
by
Aaron Skonnard