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Microsoft Burns the Midnight Oil to Bring CTP of BizTalk Server 2006 to TechEd

Despite the record-breaking heat wave in the Northwest, Microsoft developers are hard at work developing BizTalk Server 2006, the next release of the company's integration software. According to Scott Woodgate's Business Process and Integration OutBursts Web log, the BizTalk Server 2006 development team is working seven days a week to complete the Community Technology Preview (CTP) build of BizTalk Server 2006 in time to distribute it to attendees of the upcoming TechEd conference, which is being held next week in Orlando, Florida. According to Woodgate, some of the new features Microsoft is working on for this release include: adapter enhancements; applications and deployment enhancements; new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities; better developer tools; as well as runtime improvements. BizTalk Server 2006, as its name suggests, is not slated to ship until next year.

Microsoft To Stop Selling Microsoft Business Network as a Stand-Alone Application

Microsoft last month announced it will stop selling its Microsoft Business Network product, although the software will be incorporated into future versions of its ERP software. "In order to efficiently and effectively continue to meet your needs now and in the future, Microsoft has decided to incorporate the core features of Microsoft Business Network within other Microsoft Business Solutions software. Going forward, the Business Network will no longer be offered as a stand-alone application," read a May 10 message that Microsoft posted to the microsoft.public.businessnetwork newsgroup (which can be read by clicking here). The Microsoft Business Network service was introduced in the fall of 2003, and provided a series of XML-based templates designed to help small and medium sized businesses streamline the handling of documents, such as invoices and purchase orders. The offering is integrated with Outlook, Excel, BizTalk Server, and Great Plains; Microsoft is reportedly looking into continuing the offering's EDI-like functionality through its Microsoft Business Solutions ERP products, including Axapta.

Mainframe Migrations Celebrated at First Alliance Conference

Microsoft held its first Mainframe Migration conference last week in Chicago, where it and fellow Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) member Fujitsu Software trotted out former mainframe shops that are now Windows Server devotees. Among the newly converted Fujitsu Windows customers are Euronext, a European securities exchange; Galmed, a major Spanish manufacturer of galvanized steel; and Stockholmshem, a property management firm for 60,000 Stockholm residents. According to Fujitsu, all three organizations migrated their production COBOL applications from mainframe architectures to Windows using a mix of NetCOBOL, NeoKicks, and a JCL migration solution. The organizations had different reasons, and are seeing different benefits, as a result of the migration. "Our developers are just excited to be working in Visual Studio where they have such a wealth of functionality right at their finger tips, far more than any mainframe tool could ever provide," says Luis Martinez, who works as a systems integrator for Galmed. For Euronext, the benefits are financial. According to Willem Gorger, the manager of cost reduction programs for Euronext, switching one application from the mainframe to Windows provided an 80 percent savings (and 60 percent compared to outsourcing the mainframe app). There was also an unexpected benefit: The organization's batch execution time dropped from one hour and 25 minutes to seven minutes under Windows. "The performance gain has been kept quiet, as no one would believe it," Gorger says. In other alliance news, Intensity Software, which develops the KICKS for .NET migration system, announced it has joined the MMA.

Microsoft to Share Information on Spam Filtering Through New MSN Services

Even customers who don't use Microsoft Hotmail accounts can benefit from Microsoft's latest efforts to rein in spam. Last week the software giant unveiled a range of new tools to fight spam, including the MSN Postmaster, which is designed to help third-party companies reliably send e-mail to Hotmail accounts, and the new Smart Network Data Services, which helps ISPs discover things like volume of e-mail being sent from its IP space to Hotmail accounts, how that e-mail is impacted by MSN Hotmail spam filtering, and what percentage has been marked as spam. "MSN Postmaster and Smart Data Network Services represent a move by Microsoft toward broader, more-comprehensive and transparent information-sharing with ISPs and e-mail senders to help protect e-mail and ensure that it continues to be an essential and valuable communications tool," says Kevin Doerr, product unit manager for MSN Hotmail at Microsoft.

Mainsoft Launches Visual Studio for Linux

Mainsoft, one of the two companies that had access to Windows source code over the years and that offered Windows runtime environments on mainframes and Unix servers, is still in the game of trying to bridge operating systems and their architectures--but the game is a little different now than it was a decade ago. Last week, Mainsoft announced a product code-named "Grasshopper" and sold as Visual MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition, which is a plug-in for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET development tool that allows Visual Studio developers to kick out Web applications for both Windows and Linux platforms. Mainsoft has partnered with Project Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's C# compiler and its related Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment, which is being spearheaded by Novell. What Grasshopper does specifically is expose the ASP.NET and ADO.NET class libraries of Mono to Visual Studio. The enhancements that Mainsoft and the Mono Project have made to make this possible will be incorporated into Grasshopper as well as the open source Mono code.

Gartner Says IT Staffs Will Contract by 15 Percent in Five Years

Just when you thought it could not get worse, maybe it can. According to Gartner, by 2010 the number of people in the IT profession is expected to contract by 15 percent. Moreover, the company is projecting that within five years, six out of ten people affiliated with IT organization will have business-facing roles (rather than being isolated in coping with hardware and software), which at midrange and large enterprises could mean that up to a third of employees vanish compared to staffing levels in 2000. There are a lot of forces behind this trend, but Gartner expects that business units will start managing their own IT infrastructure, which leaves IT people out of the loop. Utility computing and other services-style computing are also part of this expected trend.

iWay Software Moves Beyond Adapters with New Toolset

At its annual user conference in Las Vegas last week, iWay Software unveiled new integration software that the company says takes it beyond adapters and connectors and into world of service-oriented architecture (SOA). The company introduced several new products as part of its integrated iWay Software 2005 suite of tools, including the Adaptive Framework for SOA, Adapter Manager, and Trading Manager. The Adaptive Framework includes a suite of new tools for creating and managing business flows among applications, and also includes the iWay crown jewels: the collection of 280 packaged adapters and connectors, supporting all major pre-packaged applications, data types, and e-business protocols. The iWay Adapter Manager is a runtime component that controls the interactions of those 280 connectors and adapters, or which, as iWay puts it, "enable integration implementers to introspect disparate information resources." Whereas the Adapter Manager controls and executes the actual data flows, the Adaptive Framework suite includes several other design tools, including the Application Explorer, the Adapter Designer, the Adapter Transformer (used for XML transformation), and the Trading Manager, a GUI console that helps users view and control the correlation of documents, transactions, trading partners, and communication or service channel. John Senor, the software company's president, says iWay Software 2005 marks a significant point in the evolution of the product. "We create fine-grained services from individual applications, aggregate them into coarsely grained business services, and incorporate them into Web and portal composite applications, B2B scenarios, as well as make it easier to deploy integration with our partner's integration brokers and BPM tools," he says.