Became an official BizTalk360 Product Specialist

Yesterday, BizTalk360 introduced the whole new title "BizTalk360 Product Specialist" on their blog. Because of the constantly increasing popularity of the monitoring tool BizTalk360, to streamline the process the new title and badge where introduced. The idea is to honour individuals who have gained adequate knowledge in installing, configuring and implementing BizTalk360 solution at customer sites.

The only way of obtaining this title is by receiving the confirmation from the BizTalk360 team itself. I myself filed a request immediately... And I am proud to announce my request got approved. Now I have the honour to officially call myself a "BizTalk360 Product Specialist"!

As you might have seen, I already placed the official badge at my own blog on the column on the right. I also updated my LinkedIn profile accordingly.

Guide to a BizTalk High Availability Server Environment

I just discovered a series of blog post that I just had to share with all of you... It's a complete guide to set up a High available BizTalk environment.
A perfect walthrough from start to finish to obtain a BizTalk High availability environment.

The guide covers 7 blog posts in total:

• Part 1: Preparations
• Part 2: Domain Controller Installation
• Part 3: SQL & BizTalk Active Directory Accounts
• Part 4: Prepping our SQL & BizTalk Failover Clusters
• Part 5: SQL Server 2008r2 Failover Cluster
• Part 6: BizTalk 2010 Failover Cluster Creation
• Part 7: BizTalk 2010 Installation, Configuration and Clustering

Congrats to René Brauwers on the great guide for setting up a High available BizTalk environment.

CU1 for BizTalk 2013... using Microsoft Update!

The Microsoft Team has just announced the release of the very first Cumulative Update For BizTalk 2013.

But an even more surprising news is that it is available using Microsoft Update!... This is the very first time a BizTalk Update can be obtained with Microsoft Update, as before it had to be done by downloading it manually through the hotfix download. An amazing improvement if you ask me, making it a whole lot easier for administrators.

The update will still be available through the hotfix download though.

The Content of the Cumulative Update

The very first CU for BizTalk 2013 brings 3 fixes:

• User cannot perform certain database-related operations in BizTalk Server 2013
• BAM tools cannot be configured in a multi-node BizTalk Server 2013 environment
• The vertical scroll bar on the target schema does not work correctly when you use Visual Studio to design a BizTalk Server 2013 map

How to install using Microsoft Update

The following steps are applicable if you have Microsoft Update enabled in the machine where BizTalk Server is installed.

1. Log into a server where BizTalk Server is already installed, and Microsoft Update is enabled
2. Check for windows update
3. Notice available fixes for BizTalk Server under optional updates
4. Select the update and install

(Perform the above operations in each of the BizTalk nodes)

The original announcement can be found here.