Gijsbert’s BizTalk Notes

Last week we released the Beta version of our EDI Accelerator 2006 to a limited number of customers who had signed up for beta testing the 2006 version. We are very excited about this new release, since it is the most integrated EDI solution ever running on BizTalk Server.

Highlights:

1. Full scalability, since EDI translation is now done in the pipeline

2. Orchestration based outbound batching
3. All Covast connectors (AS2, All the VANs, OFTP, FTP, FILE, MSMQ, IBM MQSeries, X.400, HTTP/s) have become BizTalk Transport Adapters
4. EDI Explorer (meta data management) integrated in Visual Studio with a very intuitive user interface
5. Deployment ease - all EDI related artifacts are part of the assembly now

Finally, BizTalk Server has become a fully capable B2B gateway that scales to even the most demanding customers’ needs.

The final version will be released end of March!

One “problem” with the fact that BizTalk Server and the EDI Accelerator are becoming very successful all the way up to the enterprise level, is that these types of companies are constantly trying to find the limits of software products. Of course Microsoft and Covast have been working very hard on making our software enterprise-ready in the past couple of years. We have deployed our solutions in enterprises that process massive amounts of EDI messages every day and we are very proud of that.

Companies however also run into limitations with regard to setting up and managing large amounts of Trading Partners in their B2B infrastructure. Imagine that you have to manage 15.000 or even more trading partners! It would be very valuable if you were able to reduce the amount of time needed to set up a trading partner in 5 hours time instead of 2 days for example. Think about the enormous cost reductions that could be made there. Monitoring SLA compliance per trading partner, partner self-testing, reporting facilities that scale to your needs and mass import and export of trading partner details are all features that would help these types of large scale companies to ease the trading partner management burden.

Covast will be releasing exactly the solution needed for this: The Trading Partner Management feature pack for the EDI Accelerator 2006 for BizTalk Server. For more information read the press release.